Review of Simon Armitage's Mister Heracles
(West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 24 February 2001)
by Kathleen Riley

In an interview for Radio 4's Front Row, Simon Armitage said of his play Mister Heracle's, "It is very much about heroism and I thought that was a strong contemporary theme." Central to the analysis of heroism, and the hero's madness, in his reworking of Euripides' text is the notion which had its genesis in Seneca's Hercules Furens and was advanced by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf in the late l9th century: "Die Tat aber ist eine Folge der herakleischen eignen Natur geworden." Armitage's play has also much in common thematically with the Herakles of American poet Archibald MacLeish which was staged in 1965 and warned of the destructive potential of heroic achievement and the consequences of man's assumption of divine prerogative and powers. Both poets examine the individual psychology of the hero in relation to the collective psychology of the Western civilised state, but whereas MacLeish's Herakles reflects the preoccupations of a Cold War climate, Armitage's play incorporates a vast trans-historical compass. Within this compass, however, his study of heroism has as its focus the cultural psychology of militarism and masculinity.

The play opens in outer space with Heracles (Adrian Bower) an astronaut gradually floating into view. Above the stage the title of the play is flashed and the scene is like the opening credits of a fllm. At the beginning of Euripides' play, the explanation for Heracles' absence is that he is undertaking his twelfth labour, an attempt to bring back Cerberus from the Underworld. In Armitage's version the 21 st century equivalent of this is interplanetary exploration, with Heracles the first man to travel at the speed of light.

In the introduction to his text Armitage says "In Mister Heracles, it is as if the whole of human history has occurred within the lifespan of one family. Atomic weapons and spears are spoken of in the same sentence, quantum physics and spinning wheels considered in the same thought .... no cultural or historical co-ordinates were beyond possibility using this fullspectrum approach." This "full-spectrum approach" is reflected in the stage design and costuming. The action of the first half of the play takes place before the derelict house of Heracles, now boarded up and surrounded by high wire fencing. The house looks simultaneously like a detached suburban villa and a ruined Greek temple. Tied to the fence are bouquets of rotting flowers, recalling for the modern audience the outpouring of grief that attended the death of a much more recent figure heroised by popular imagination. To the left of the stage are the makeshift cardboard living quarters of Heracles' family where his three young sons are asleep. Their mother Megara (Clare McCarron) is seated on a milk crate, her head resting against the wire fence, while Heracles' father Amphitryon (Matthew ScurFeld) stands centre stage addressing the audience. This family group has the appearance of prisoners of war or refugees whose images are familiar from Second World War news reels. Yet the setting also gives the impression of a post atomic apocalypse. This impression is aided by the appearance of the chorus, who, in modern dress and grimy blue work coats, have the task of cleaning up after the fallout. Lycus (Rupert Holliday Evans), the usurping tyrant who threatens Heracles' family, is, like his Euripidean counterpart, a sneering parvenu and, in Amphitryon's invective against him, there is also the suggestion that he is a mafioso or drugs baron.

In place of the sober chorus of elderly Thebans in Euripides' play is a cynical and ribald quartet of mixed gender, age and ethnicity. These four enter onto the stage from different parts of the auditorium. They speak individually and occasionally in unison. Their choral odes are accompanied by music and in the second of these the strophe and antistrophe of the original ode have been adapted in the choreography of twelve 'songs' which are performed alternately by the members of the chorus in a style akin to modern rap music. These songs depict the labours of Heracles as the deeds of a comic strip super hero.

In preparation for their execution, and at Megara's request, the family are permitted by Lycus to enter the house and exchange their ragged clothes for party outfits. When they reemerge the boys are dressed in kilts, Megara in a party dress and tartan sash and Amphitryon in tails and campaign medals. They appear as the proud stock of the army establishment.

Their apparently fixed fate is suddenly arrested by the return of Heracles. He makes his entry from the top of the stairs at the rear of the auditorium, bellowing in robust Yorkshire tones, "The conqueror returns!" As he approaches the stage and his family, the bluff warrior holds out his fist, red hot from the speed of his travels, to a member of the audience, challenging, "Look there, feel at that." His costume is a cross between the uniforms of an English squaddie and an American air force pilot. It is clear from his exchange with his father about his latest mission that this Heracles' Eurystheus is a state military organisation from which, by his own admission, he is absent without leave. Consistent with his unspecific uniform, this military entity to which Heracles is responsible is unnamed and could as easily be NASA as a northern army battalion. What is significant is that, unlike Euripides' Heracles, who is individual and solitary, Armitage's hero operates within an overt and organised military culture.

Despite Heracles' initial show of bravado and his slightly imperious manner, qualities which liken him to a miles gloriosus from New Comedy, his reunion with his family is played out with great tenderness. Armitage has beautifuhy rendered into modern verse Euripides' moving simile in which Heracles compares his children to little boats towed after a ship: "All climb into me,/ .... Sail in my slipstream,/ my candle afloat/ and my paper boats." As the hero links hands with his wife and sons and leads them back into their house, their movement does indeed resemble that of a flotilla. Heracles' simple assertion to his family, "Today is put back" is a powerful close to the tale of the play's first half and an effective prelude to the climax with which the second half begins.

Much less effective is Armitage's reworking of the epiphany of Iris and Lyssa and its bathetic staging by co-directors Natasha Betteridge and Simon Godwin. Two members of the chorus (Georgina Roberts and Nick Bagnall) double as Iris and Madness and their entry is heralded by the whirring of a helicopter and a miniature cyclone of urban debris. Iris, tall, European and with an air of bored indifference and Madness, a middle-class under achiever dissatisfied with his dirty work, display a clinical detachment in the execution of their assignment to 'inject' madness into Heracles. These two characters seem to be parodies of the James Bond world of glamour and gadgetry and owe something as well to the Cold War landscape of a John le Carre spy novel. Unlike Euripides' Lyssa, who "runs races into Heracles' heart," Armitage's Madness uses an electronic device which locks onto Heracles' frequency, activating a violence that is intuitive and has been honed by his years of killing on behalf of the state.

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