I read Euripides’s Trojan Women after viewing the Getty Villa performance, granting me with an interesting perspective on adaptation. Because I viewed the performance prior to reading the play, my evaluation of which scenes were most important was based more on what stood out to me during the performance rather than which lines of the written text struck me as meaningful. This led to a strange reading experience in which I expected Talthybius to have a much larger role because I believe the soldier gave a powerful performance in the play.
Talthybius acted with great angst and regret, perfectly depicting the lost soul of a soldier who knows nothing but war. When reading the play, I felt some of this angst was not present (although it is certainly there, just to a lesser extent), and I was especially surprised when I read Cassandra say “In their hunt for Helen, the Greeks lost countless men – because of one woman, one love affair” (49), for this is nearly identical to one of the soldier’s lines in the performance. For me, this was the most memorable line in the play because it effectively combined a great, impassioned performance with a message that can transcend time and relate to today, for war is a timeless subject.
I wonder what my experience would be like if I had read the play before viewing the performance. I likely would have been frustrated by the performance, wishing it fulfilled the promise of my favorite lines and scenes from Euripides’ writing. Instead, I found the performance to be a much more complete, meaningful, and empowering work. It is likely that I simply enjoyed the performance more than reading the play because I saw the performance first, and judged the play against it, but there is no way to change this, so I accept this as reality.
The Getty’s rendition served as a terrific reminder of the power of performance, for while the plot and script were slightly changed, the most significant difference between seeing a performance and reading a play is the power of the unreadable – of the passion that words alone cans never convey. I believe this is the largest reason for changing Talthybius into a more morally conflicted and ambivalent soldier, for this serves as an effective commentary on today’s war stricken world. We do not live in a world fighting over “one woman” or “one love affair,” but we do live in a world of questionable wars. It is unlikely that the Getty’s rendition of the play is meant to be a commentary on today’s wars, but the beauty of art and performance is that the audience can be affected in many different ways, and I felt the power of a soldier lost in war, lost in orders, and longing to begin his life. This is a message clearly not present in Euripides’ play, so I was unable to avoid a sense of disappointment as I felt a sense of emptiness while flipping the final pages of The Trojan Women.
I too read the majority of the play after I had seen the performance. I thought that seeing the play first actually helped me understand what I was reading better. Sometimes writing confuses me, but I already had an idea of what the main plot was before going into it. Because of this, I actually enjoyed reading the play more than it seems like you did. I think I had a better understanding because I saw the performance and read the text. I was better able to pick up on the differences between the two. The fact that Andromache killed her own child made the play much more dramatic than the text that we read.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree that the Andromache twist made the play much more emotional and shocking than the text. This was clearly the largest change between the two versions, and I think the Getty was bold to make such a drastic change to a classic work. I was disappointed when this twist was not included in the text because I was looking forward to seeing how Euripides would depict the scene. This is another one of the reasons why i preferred the Getty version of the play, for it carried much more emotion and pain - welcome parts of an effective tragedy.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's very difficult to competitively contrast the two mediums. The play elected to deviate from the thematic content of the text, as see in the example you discussed: Andromache's murder. The murder, and the emotional preformance by the soldier, appealed to the audience's morality and attempted us to involve ourselves in the character's grief. The text concentrated upon issues such as fate vs. agency (Cassandra's prophesies are given greater length, the god's play a more active role, Athena is in the play). Therefore a preferential distinction should be drawn solely from a standpoint of entertainment, not the merits of the content because the contents diverged from one another.
ReplyDelete