“IT’S A tough play and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, if enjoy is the right word,” says General Sir Michael Rose of Katie Mitchell’s staging of Iphigenia in Aulis. “The military bit is down played. She did not want it too gung-ho . . . but I suggested that she might take it up a notch in terms of the way Agamemnon and Menelaus spoke to each other in their bearing and body language.
“If you took a squaddie out of the Union Jack club behind the National and took him to the play and asked him which were the two generals, he’d be hard pushed to identify them . . .
“But it’s an interesting, challenging play. Did I see myself as Agamemnon? Hardly. I spent most of my military career trying to stop children being killed. “My wife said that (the role of) Clytemnestra was a very good comment on the position of a wife of somebody in the military who’s away a lot.
“I do think Euripides is relevant: the political spin and the propagandising are dead on. As the play shows, soldiers are often politicians, especially in places such as Iraq and Sierra Leone. I didn’t feel much sympathy for the (Greek) leaders. They sold out the chief point of principle — to preserve mankind.
“If you take my own experience in Bosnia, they kept trying to get me to sell out the principle of the United Nations on behalf of the credibility of Nato. That pressure was coming from my own government, from the United States, and from every corrupt dictatorship in the world all saying you’re being too neutral or siding with the Serbs or whatever. We were mandated to peace-keep. I didn’t want to make the same mistake we made in Mogadishu, which was a catastrophe for the peacekeepers and the poor people of Somalia.
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“Katie has made the key point that it was pretty much the same 2,000 years ago as it is today.”
RG-L