با تشکر از حامد و جلسات نمایشنامه‌خوانی‌ش

Continuing the tradition of greek tragedy reviewing.

Sophocles is by all definitions one of the greatest playwrites of all time. He focuses on the psyche, and often on characters who fall by doing the right thing: who define themselves by honorable traits until it kills them. These plays may be less known on the whole, but still pack a punch.

I did notice that these plays had little affect on me in comparison to certain others by Sophocles, but I believe this may partially be a result of translation; these translations feel less biting, less sharp, more direct meaning than emotion.

Reviewed Plays from this Collection
→Ajax ★★★☆☆ Sophocles← (c.445 BCE) (from a diff. volume)
Ajax is a man with a name that shrieks: the Greeks would have called him Aias. The vocative, when speaking to him, would've sounded like aiai, the Greek exclamation. In this play, following Ajax's final day after a prophesy comes he will kill himself, he certainly lives up to that. After this one day, the time for his fate to come will expire, and he may live. Ajax dies upon a Trojan sword, on Trojan ground, but he has placed it himself.

Tecmessa, Ajax's wife and war-bride, plays a much wider role in this than expected: she garners respect, in contrast to the expectations for war brides. Yet she still has a fragile role. The consequences for her if Ajax dies are not just losing him, but losing everything. His son, Eurysaces, would be considered illegitimate; indeed, this is the fate of his half-brother, Teucer. The contrast between him and Teucer is also interesting: while Teucer is an archer, associated with cowards (Paris) and tricksters (Odysseus), Ajax is a straight-shooting fighter. But the 'deception' speech to Tecmessa complicates this, using arrow imagery around his upcoming death.

The breaks in convention are notable: the play breaks typical narrative structure, the location shifts, the chorus leaves and comes back, and Ajax dies on stage, rather than off.

Notable Lines (John Moore translation):
CHORUS: Strangely the long & countless drift of time brings all things forth from darkness into light. (646)
AJAX: My speech is womanish for this woman's sake. (652)

→Electra ★★★★★ Sophocles← (unk)
Reviewed here.

→Women of Trachis ★★★★★ Sophocles← (unk)
The saddest of these plays... to me, anyway. Following Deianira, wife of Heracles, as she is tricked by the dead into killing her husband, this play pulls its audience in. Deianira is hopeless, but never pathetic—she uses what agency she has to great renown.

This play made me feel genuinely claustrophobic. We, as the audience, know from the beginning that Deianira is killing her husband through her actions: as she battles with whether to stand still or act, we know she should stand still. But it is impossible to fully want that for her. It is her willingness to act that makes her so compelling; it gives her the chance to fix her life, and eventually destroys her life.

→Philoctetes ★★★☆☆ Sophocles← (409 BCE)
This play revolves around the consequences of an evil trick played by the Greeks (as per usual). Ten years ago, the Greek army abandoned war hero Philoctetes on an abandoned island. Now, as per a prophecy, trickster Odysseus and young Neoptolemus must retrieve him. The character of Neoptolemus here must grapple with the bones he's standing on, but also keep the peace with both parties.

This play is interesting in that, like Ajax, it's a story about war that occurs removed from war. This is a recurring theme of Greek tragedy: the battles are not actually the topic of drama. It is the psychological trauma of war and the dynamics of heroism that are up for debate.

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This comment is for AJAX, not the other plays in this collection. Simply: a very good translation of a great play.

What can I say? All of the well-known Greek playwrights are important reading, both for their historical significance as well as the fact that they're excellent plays. They haven't remained famous for 2,400 years because they're not worthy of it.

Ajax
Electra
Women of Trachis
Philoctetes

Not keen to fall behind on my Ancient Greece reading, I picked up these four plays from the great Golden Age revitalizer of Athenian theater, responsible, in his time, for producing works of vastly increased sophistication - in set design, structure, psychology and dramatic heft - related to what came before. “Ajax” is, for a tragedy, somewhat hopeful of a tale, one of post-mortem redemption and former enemies moving past grievances. “Electra”, on the other hand, is a true-to-Gods tragedy of intrafamily cut-throating, its final matricide seeming to merely leave the survivors wallowing in their continued cycle of violence. Bipartite “Women of Trachis” weaves a family’s downfall to cunning and deceit. Finally, in “Philoctetes”, death and downfall are averted, and it manages to be the most optimistic of the bunch, with re-established allies setting sail for Troy, in accordance with the will of the Gods (not that one would have an alternative in this type of tale).

Sophocles wrote emotionally moving plays that depict powerful collisions between two conflicting views on honor and morality. With the exception of Electra, each play ends with the two warring sides transcending their polarized viewpoints and reaching a resolution together. This resolution is triggered by the counsel of an outside influence, be it another character who shows up fashionably late or a ghost come back from the dead.

This exploration of conflict has a few recurring themes. Sometimes the point of contention is the burial rights over one's enemy (Ajax & Antigone), sometimes it's the returning of an exile to the group from which they were cast out (Oedipus at Colonus & Philoctetes), and sometimes it's over a character's well-meaning actions that yielded unintentionally tragic results (Oedipus Rex & Women of Trachis).

I didn't find these stories to be as interesting as those in his Oedipus trilogy, however I still felt an empathy and at times an emotional connection made with the characters. His version of Electra was less interesting than those of Euripides and Aeschylus, yet it was perhaps easier to understand the emotional turmoil of Electra than in the versions penned by his contemporaries. I found Ajax to be the most moving and interesting of the bunch and was absent of the sort of afterthought intercession or slapdash story resolution that the endings of Women of Trachis and Philoctetes had. A variety of viewpoints mix together in the play Ajax, and the story flows and resolves naturally and owing more to good character than to any trick of the story.

Short, and semi-simple. You have to have the mindset of the time to really get anything important out of this story, but a good read.

☆ 3

Philoctetes deserved better

زنان تراخیس: ۴.۵
آژاکس: ۴
الکترا: ۲
فیلوکتتس: ۲‌.۵

و بله، هیچ‌کس اوریپید نمیشه :))

I only read Ajax & coordinating intro. This was for a special bookclub called "Ancient Greeks & Modern Life". Ajax is a combat vet returning home & things don't go well. The connection to modern life is currently returning vets have the same troubles adapting to civilian life, perhaps more so since most their peers out of the combat zone have no idea, nor want to know what they've done to make it home. At least in ancient Greece, all (male) citizens served from 18 yrs to 60 yrs old, so peers out of the combat zone knew what being at war was like & what it could do to a mind of even the bravest.