She has turned The Simpsons into a post-apocalyptic opera, invented her own language and put on a communist Dracula pageant. Now, the US playwright is staging the creepy, late-night TV classic that scarred her as a child “One of my responses to 9/11 was to decide that I was going to learn ancient Greek,” remembers the American playwright Anne Washburn. “Suddenly there was all this discussion of western civilisation being under attack. And what is western civilisation? It starts in Athens.” Washburn’s attempt to learn ancient Greek failed – “I’m terrible with languages” – but she did end up writing new versions of the Euripides plays Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis. After a month of rehearsing Orestes, she sat down in 2010 to write her best known work, Mr Burns, in which the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons becomes the basis for a post-apocalyptic human culture as the survivors of a nuclear disaster tell and retell the story of the episode to each other. Continue reading...
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