Mister Heracles: after Euripides

'He gets his inspiration from brothels and drinking-dens; his lyrics are full of dance-floor rhythms or foreign wails...' Even in 405BC, as the sneers of his near contemporary Aristophanes suggest, Euripides was considered far too much of a modernist. Today, new generations of readers, swayed by his supposed agnosticism, his pascificm, even his feminism, continue to claim him as a 'contemporary'. Paradoxically, though, Euripides's complex, almost static plays have proved far less popular than those of fellow tragedians Aeschylus or Sophocles - performed less, translated less, understood less, as the desparate messages posted by students on Classics Internet Resources Pages reveal ('Does anyone out there have a Cliff Notes on Medea PLEASE!!!').

For Euripides's translators, the difficulty is two-fold: how can they retain the strangeness and mystery of the ancient text, while at the same time put bums on today's seats? Heracles, one of Euripides's most perplexing and brutal plays, in which the eponymous hero returns from his labours to rescue his beseiged family only to slay them himself in a divine-sent fit of madness, poses particular problems; modern audiences might be well-versed in the spectator sport of other people's misery, but they are still likely to be discomfited by a lack of narrative resolution or even moral blame. In Mister Heracles, a new version commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, poet Simon Armitage offers his own solution; convey the ancient and the modern simultaneously 'as if,' he explains in his short but empassioned introduction, 'the whole of human history has occurred in the life span of one family.'

In practice, this method means a melange of imagery, mixing up, as Armitage points out, ancient weaponry with modern nuclear technology (a poetic conceit, after all, which dates back to Homer whose heroes fight with bronze but plough with iron) and sweeping in references to Roman history, Christian belief, even current commercial iconography as the Lycus downgrades the heroic Heracles to 'Milk Tray Man'.

Such anachronisms can stir up intense opposition but they serve an important purpose; to remind the reader of the foreignness of the text, to jar them into the realisation that what they are reading - or hearing - is not the original but a translated work, an individual's response to the creative stimulus of the original. So while Euripides infamously introduced the everyday into the tragic, Mister Heracles, as it's down-home title suggests, explores the tragic in the everyday; the temple attendant, for example, witnessing 'by happenchance' Heracle's frenzied slaughter of his wife and children, 'the way a person walking along the beach/ or harbour might be asked to photograph/ a sweet family grouping.' Armitage's interest in the ironic possibilities of the common cliche ('Hell's teeth', 'high heaven') also complements Euripides's own highly-developed sense of dramatic irony, underpinning the play's piling of reversal on reversal, from defeat and despair to hope and joy and then back to terror, guilt and finally horrified resignation.

Armitage, too, turns the wheel one more time. In Mister Heracles the gods are not only dead but unmourned, as if they'd never been, and Heracle's great labours reduced to vague wonderings 'deep down, far wide, mile high, inside and out...' Meanwhile, Heracle's madness derives not so much from divine retribution but some unspecified powerful interest he has offended ('you see, we had money, money riding on his head'), the penalty for a life dedicated to violence. If this reading diminishes the original's strong religious impulse, its sense of an embattled humanity struggling to survive in the face of the weak, if not wilful, negligence of the gods (after all, when terrible things happen, Euripides asks, who can find it in their hearts to trust in heaven?), the clarity and compassion of Armitage's verse more than compensates; 'tuck my children into their small graves,' Heracles begs as he is finally led away, 'and my wife - tired of waiting - let her rest'.

All in all, Mister Heracles is a courageous attempt to reimagine a difficult, dark play for modern audiences - 'five hundred verses,' as H.D. Kitto saw it, 'that few would re-read for pleasure.' And while no translator can ever transmute the uncompromising horror of the play (nor, of course, would they want to), Armitage's lyricism, wit and pathos at least allows us to read his new version if not with pleasure then with interest - and admiration.

Mister Heracles