Moira Buffini's new play is by my calculations the second by a woman to hit the big Olivier stage at the National Theatre after Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin in 2008, the first ever by a living female writer. Full marks to Nicholas Hytner for taking a leap of faith and commissioning these works, but Welcome to Thebes is, just like Her Naked Skin, a bit of a muddle which should have been ruthlessly sent back for rewriting. It's a mixed evening, with some rewarding moments and top-notch performances, but Buffini is ultimately trying to pack too many themes and stories into one play.
She is trying to harness the epic power of Greek legends in the service of a contemporary political theme, borrowing from the Theban civil war, the rebellion of Antigone against her father's order stopping her burying her brother's body, the story of Phaedra and Theseus, and half a dozen other handy myths. But the main character, Eurydice, the widow of Creon the Theban king, is largely an invention. 'I replaced a male autocrat with a female democrat,' Buffini writes in the programme. The newly elected popular leader, inspired by Liberia's election of a woman president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf after a terrible civil war, symbolises an attempt to break the cycle of patriarchal oppression and violence against women. But all these competing narratives seem to cancel each other out. It's hard to reconcile modern politics with the ancient Greek idea of the arbitrary rule of the gods determining our fates. As a reflection of African politics, the play has some good moments, with Theseus arriving by helicopter surrounded by bureaucrats and security men as the leader of the all-powerful neighbouring state of Athens, on which the Thebans, their city and presidential palace ruined by conflict, will be forced to rely. The most interesting scenes in the play are between David Harewood's imperious Theseus and Nikki Amuka-Bird's spirited but naive Eurydice. They are joined by Price Tydeus, a swaggering dangerous warlord, played by Chuk Iwuji, whom I last saw on stage as the saintly but hopeless King Henry VI in the RSC's Histories cycle. These three A-list actors are all magnetically watchable, but despite their efforts the play remains a series of fragments.
Richard Eyre, the last boss of the National Theatre but one, returns to the South Bank to direct this play, but somehow manages to make it seem very static. In his memoirs, Eyre writes gloomily about his problems dealing with the giant Olivier stage, and this production reinforces my view that he works best in smaller spaces like the Cottesloe. This production shuns the revolve, which is sometimes overused, but the result is a play that never manages the Shakespearan shift between the public scenes of politics and the private scenes of intimacy. The permanent backdrop of Tim Hatley's set is a giant ruined building, a presidential palace half-destroyed by bombardment.
As I left I made a mental comparison with another play set in Africa which I saw recently, treating some of the same themes -- Lynn Nottage's Ruined. That one worked brilliantly because the writer started with the characters and their stories, building up slowly to create a wider political drama. Welcome to Thebes suffers by comparison because the playwright begins with abstract concepts and tries to fit the characters into them. While the dilemma of a democratically elected woman president trying to avoid ruling through force is well imagined, other aspects of African politics are handled with less certainty. The tone is too shouty, the African courtesies and formalities aren't observed, and there are too many jokes at the wrong moment.
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