My inner intellectual skiver flinched at the idea of a play using Greek myths in a context of modern Africa to explore ideas about women in politics. It could be hell. But it’s not. It’s thrilling. Moira Buffini’s strange and daring play is directed with brio by Sir Richard Eyre: it is moving, wise, funny, horrifying, and studded with beautifully judged swearwords.
Scruffy militiamen — one a small child — run through the audience with machineguns, ordering us to make no sudden moves, and switch phones off (“Any f***ing disco tunes and I will not answer for my men!”). The teenage girl soldier Megaera, a fabulous turn from young Madeline Appiah, tells her story with mocking savagery — “If I could describe you how it felt the way they held me down and tore, you would be sick . . . we’d be here all day while you had counselling”. Cue nervous laughter and a total engagement that never falters over the next three hours.
Buffini creates an imaginary African state called Thebes: the patrician Theseus (David Harewood), helicopters in to its chaos from smug democratic Athens. Thebes has elected an idealistic woman leader: Eurydice (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who fills her Cabinet with sensible women. But like Theseus she is enmeshed in bitterness: woven into every political discussion are hints of Phaedra’s imminent betrayal, Antigone’s stubborn grief , and President Eurydice’s murdered son. Tydeus, the charismatic opposition leader, is prone to channelling Dionysus. In the background is Sparta, a grim alternative ally if the Athenians won’t help. Polynices — a murderous warlord — lies unburied onstage, the fate of his body a pivot of the story.
The reason it works — apart from the willingness to twist tragedy into sudden black absurdity and back again — is not only that the myths of Ancient Greece have a lot in common with African conflicts: tribalism, superstition, breathtaking brutalities. It takes you wider. Eurydice, fresh from house arrest, evokes Aung San Suu Kyi; the arguments over justice versus a clean slate bring us home to the Saville Inquiry; the Western intervention echoes Afghanistan. When Theseus is repelled by the machete viciousness, Eurydice sweetly asks whether computerised missiles are “more civilised because you can’t hear people scream”. Aglaea (Aicha Kossoko) fleetingly brings to mind Diane Abbott when Eurydice despairingly says ,“You should be leader” and she replies “yes, but no one likes me”.
It’s that sort of play: full of resonances you weren’t expecting, jokes you didn’t see coming, tension becoming absurd and then tragic when a conference table becomes the bitterest of biers. It raises huge questions with wit. And in Bruce Myers’s camp hag-prophet Tiresias it has the authentic thrill and terror of myth. Go. Take a politician.
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