Avignon festival Martin Crimp’s version of Euripides’ Phoenician Women is sly and violent, while its sphinx’s riddles read like exam questions from hell He might recently have been haunting the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, but playwright Martin Crimp seems more at home outside Britain. His translations of French classics are justly celebrated, while certain German theatres treat him almost like a house dramatist. His latest appearance at the Avignon festival, The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from Cinema, a version of Euripides’ little-performed Phoenician Women, is appropriately transnational: a French version of a script that debuted in German in 2013, translated from English, itself adapted from Greek. Focusing on the tragedy of Oedipus, it narrates a part of the tale we don’t often hear, the catastrophic fallout for the hero’s family. We encounter his mother Jocasta – who, catastrophically, he has married – her long-suffering daughter, Antigone, and their sons, Eteocles and Polynices, together locked in conflict. Oedipus himself only appears at the very end, blinded and befuddled. Centre stage in this version are the Women, halfway between a conventional Greek chorus and Macbeth’s Witches, administering malign fate and purring sphinx-like riddles: “If Anna has two more ponies than Miriam / and Miriam’s cat Bobby has seven kittens / then what is it like to kill?” Continue reading...
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