An Iliad

[starlady]

An Iliad. Dir. Lisa Peterson.

I went to see this show at Berkeley Rep on Tuesday night - I splurged on season tickets this summer when I was feeling rich, but I totally forgot to go see Chinglish. D'oh.

Overall, I liked the play, and I especially liked the authorial decisions to have the play mostly be retold in modern language, and that it was a one-man show with the Poet himself as the one man (though, how else could it have been done?). The Poet stumbles in compelled to tell his story, though as he admits, "Every time I tell this story, I hope it's for the last time." It's never for the last time, and I liked that this production had clearly been updated to take the ongoing wars around the world since it was written (on the brink of the Iraq war) into account, though of course one deplores the necessity. It's not hard to make the Iliad speak to our time, and I liked that it did. I also liked that they used the Fagles translation as their base, since the Fagles translation is my favorite.

That said, why no one in the production could be bothered to ask anyone how to actually pronounce Greek - not even Homeric Greek, but classical or even modern Greek - was really annoying to me. Granted I"m over-educated, but to hear the Poet mispronounce the fourth word of the entire poem, and keep mispronouncing words and names, really grated. The other thing is that, powerful as this show was, I don't know how much that was new it really added to the Iliad, y'know? Though, I'm not sure that's the standard by which I ought to judge this play. It certainly does bring the Iliad to new audiences, and it does make the Iliad into an anti-war story, which, as I've said before, I'm not convinced that the actual Iliad actually is. (I'm happy to go on about why, if anyone wants; just ask.) And that's probably the Iliad we need right now, inasmuch as we ever need the Iliad. Maybe one day it really will be told for the last time; but not yet.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm curious whether the mispronunciations were of the sort that conforms to modern expectations (we don't pronounce all those names the way they really should be), or were just flat-out wrong.

[wild_irises]

Having given up my subscription to Berkeley Rep some years ago because I thought their quality (and play choice) were going downhill, I hope you keep letting us know what you see there.

I go occasionally. I might well go to The White Snake.

[starlady]

The actor mispronounced the fourth word of the entire poem - Πηληϊάδεω, which was the point when I just cringed. It's supposed to be a diphthong pronounced "dyo" ( this is a diphthong that was lost in classical), but he pronounced "de-o", which makes the line unmetrical. I know a little modern Greek, and he wasn't pronouncing modern Greek. Most of the names conformed to the sort of English standard that's developed (though most of those names are not pronounced right, either). I don't remember clearly, but he may have also mispronounced part of the last line (ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο), too.

I freely admit that I know too much about this, and I would have been happy with a consistent accent even if it hadn't been Homeric (though modern Greek has lost so many of the vowels and diphthongs that it probably wouldn't be metrical anymore if you did try to do the verse with modern pronunciations), but there wasn't one.

[starlady]

I really like Mary Zimmerman.