Colossus based on Aeschylus’ tragedy “Agamemnon” directed by Thanos Papaconstantinou
Virgil
Following the warm reception by critics and audiences alike of the works “Venison” (2012) and “Pedestal” (2013), inspired by The Eumenides and The Choephori respectively, Thanos Papaconstantinous’ “Colossus” comes to complete the third and final part of the trilogy “Carnage” constituting, as much dramaturgically as by direction, a loose adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
The performance “Colossus” is inspired by Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. It is the third and final part of a trilogy based upon Aeschylus’ Oresteia, following “Venison” and “Pedestal”.
With a clear reference to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, and more specifically to the place of women within them, we follow the path of a woman and her transformation from a devout follower, exemplary wife and good mother into a mythical monster who desires the utter destruction of everything.
The first images are of a Chorus of soldiers at the call of an appalling war which is raging outside the walls of the city, at first discarding and then arranging, on stage, the spoils of war – the bloodstained clothes of the defeated. A monument of the history of the world.
The second images are of scenes from a woman’s life, inside her home. Her husband is at the battlefront and she is agonizingly waiting for him whilst keeping the house in order. However, a girl visits her from the death-field and her presence corrodes the idyllic family happiness. The war-zone has now spread its reach inside the home.
The woman is haunted by images of destruction and death. Her husband returns from the front with the spoils of victory. His wife receives him with a dinner, at the end of which she sacrifices him, in turn, in the name of a new order of things, where the traditional order of things is abolished. We must return to a state of barbarity, everything must be destroyed in order for there to be a new beginning.
In the last images the woman dresses herself in the clothes of the dead. Her attire is made up of all the clothes of the fallen that were strewn across the floor. She herself becomes a new monument, a mythical monster – frozen and mute.
The course of the “Carnage” trilogy which follows – not by chance – a reversed order of things, attempts to depict the path of a person from an organized state system towards a vigilante self-ruled society, in contrast to that which is suggested in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where man and his condition moves from the bloodied circle of self-rule towards the state and institutional organization of a democratic regime.
