This is Thebes, nor are we out of it...

Friday 7th March 2025 - on Zoom

Present: Marie Collett, Colin Ellwood,  Fiz Marcus, Georgia Murphy, Janine Ulfane, David Whitworth

WELCOME TO THEBES -  Moira Buffini 2010
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A reading of Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes, a very mythic play set in a place itself beset by  myths. The reading itself was something of a joyous miracle…six readers tip-toeing through a landscape on fire, peopled with upwards of 26 speaking parts, and with several long scenes featuring a large number of these characters are volubly present

Overall the play depicts a clash between the old  and the new. On the one hand a  culture steeped in the mythical past, obsessed by death and 'fate', and on the other, one claiming to be of the future, of rationality, freedom and democracy. But the future, it turns out, must somehow acknowledge and grow out of the past, and is not so rational and freedom-loving as its more obvious supporters profess. The women ultimately make the difference, and navigate towards hope.

The play  was originally staged at the National in 2010, and inhabits what might call now be called the broader Greek mythical ‘universe’, most saliently in this case a kind of blowing up or super-saturating of Sophocles’s Antigone. But it doesn’t (as the Greek tragedies themselves largely do) offer a baked in truth about the potency of fate as the ultimate victor in a zero-sum game against humanity.  ‘Blind’ fate (as initially embodied in the blind seer Tiresias) is ultimately checked, with its avatars ultimately guided by optimistic sighted companions. Antigone as one of the latter is initially close to despair, but with her determination to bury her brother Polynices, 'because it is right', provokes new president Eurydice's crisis (see below), leading to the play's central 'breakthrough'. She ends up leading the near-blind (but endlessly positive/constructive) Haemon (Eurydice's son), 

Thebes in the original Richard Eyre production was an African country, but it could stand for any  failing state with an ethos and tradition that predates enlightenment rationality. It could be Libya, Bosnia, possibly Ukraine in times to come, or any European state in the future, for that matter, including the UK.

Eurydice, the widow of previous ruler Creon, has won the recent election with her women’s party and seeks truth and reconciliation. But she also needs the financial help and general support of Theseus, the ‘1st Citizen’ of Athens, which in the play pretty much stands for the US. Theseus has flown in for the inauguration ceremony. Armed militia groups and would-be populist demagogues are still ranging across the landscape.  The portrait of realpolitik is persuasive, with the US/Athens apparent democratic idealism shown as masking a ‘free-enterprise’, realpolitik id. The apparent 'misunderstandings'  between the two heads of state resonate with recent developments in relation to Ukraine/US relations

But the spine of the piece concerns whether Eurydice can navigate her own and the country's trauma and demons, to mobilise and institutionalise hope.  She just about does it, in the process confessing to one huge mistake: the refusal to bury Polynices, the killer of her young son. The interior pressure of that and the exterior pressure of ‘Athens’ and her domestic opponents almost do her in, but somehow she fashions a meaningful compromise, creates a new and constructive political  ‘myth’.  She has allies, while in the meantime some of her malign opponents implode or leave.  Amongst those still standing at the end is her son (now blind) Haemon, who in the ecology of the play replaces a blind Tiresias obsessed with fate and death; and Antigone, who ultimately finds the courage and resources to simply live. This couple is the final one of three blind-man/guiding-young-woman duos evoked in the play, the other two being Antigone/Oedipus; Tiresias and kidnapped girl Harmonium. And there is even a variant fourth, if you count Harmonium finally supporting Talthybia, an Athenian apparatchik ultimately 'gone native' in Thebes. An image of human helplessness slowly becomes one of positive agency towards the future
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The Euridice journey is key of course (the psychological valency and broader  resonance  of her Polynices decision, her subsequent admission of error and the creativity of her subsequent political 'myth making' and enlightened realpolitik thereafter). But many of the actors/characters are given interesting developments. Aside from Talthybia, and the Antigone/Haemon/Ismene/Tiresias/Harmonia nexus (along with Polykleitos, the key artificer of the piece, the mechanic of the universe...a compassionate Hephestos), there is for example the slow unfolding of the tragic father/son relationship between veteran  soldier Miletus, and traumatised child turned 'junior lieutenant'  Scud.

As Harmonia sings (her only utterance in the play and surely the DNA that informs it all)

The gods of death 
Have feasted here 
Lift your soul 
Up to Elysium 
May you be free 
May you be free