TROJAN FORCE
Stephen Fry's account of ancient mythology is gripping, but message is unclear,
Mythos: Men By Stephen Fry, directed by Tim Carroll. Until July 15 at the Shaw Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. Shawfest.com and 1-800-511-7429. This is Part 3 of Karen Fricker’s threenight Mythos diary. The final night of Stephen Fry’s
Mythos trilogy is titled Men, but it’s not quite about ordinary folk like you and me. Rather, it’s his typically quirky, gripping account of the Trojan War.
Unlike the other two nights, which begin with tongue-incheek pomp, Fry goes for a soft open: It starts with him lying on the stage floor in the guise of Odysseus, who in Book 6 of the
Odyssey washes up naked on a beach and is treated kindly by Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous. Fry jokes that he’s spared us by turning up clothed, unlike his central character: As in the other segments, he’s wearing a contemporary smart jacket and trousers.
As before, what most impressed me was Fry’s capacity to keep his audience enthralled as he tells stories within stories within stories. More than half of this evening is an extended parenthesis: sitting at Alcinous’s dinner table, Odysseus explains what has brought him to their shores: “You may have heard of a place called Troy,” he says, launching a retelling of the
Iliad and Odyssey. Odysseus’s voice becomes Fry’s, and I pretty much forgot about this opening frame as we heard the stories of Paris (Greek for “backpack” — who knew?), Leda and the swan, Achilles and his infamous heel, and Odysseus’s encounters with the Cyclops and Circe. There was something deeply satisfying when Odysseus’s story catches up to him sitting at that dinner table — the story comes full circle.
My companion for this final night is Roberta Doylend, a theatre designer, who agrees that the most compelling aspect of the show is Fry’s capacity to “capture and retain the audience … you know how in some theatre, you feel you’re there at first but it just kind of wanes away? I’m hanging on every word; I’m looking at all the elements but they’re superfluous to the man who’s sitting in the chair and speaking.”
As we entered the theatre, Roberta admired the choice of material for the projection screens that ring the back of the playing area (designed by Douglas Paraschuk for both this production and The Magician’s Nephew, also directed by Tim Carroll). Using fibreglass allows the screens to capture and refract light from the front and back, adding luminosity and “almost a 3D effect.”
While she admired the “simplicity of the projections,” designed by Nick Bottomley — which mostly establish setting through images of rocky landscapes, misty forests, and maps of Greece and the Mediterranean — she wondered if all were necessary or had the effect that Fry and Carroll were going for. While she read the huge ani- mated foot that appears on the screens during the passage about Achilles’ heel as “so Monty Python,” it didn’t prompt audience laughter on the night we attended.
While I found the way in which Fry uses different British and Irish accents to distinguish between the characters witty, Roberta thought it was somewhat distracting, reminding her of BBC TV series in which historical figures from all over the world somehow seemed to all come from England.
Overall, I found that seeing all three segments of this epic piece in succession, while providing evidence of Fry’s amazing capacities of memory and charisma, led to diminishing returns.
There’s the conceit in all three of a game called Mythical Pursuit (based on Trivial Pursuit) in which audiences shout out a colour and Fry answers a question from the category the colour refers to.
This seems intended to add a level of spontaneity and audience interaction — it’s an example of the “two-way theatre” that is central to Carroll’s vision for the Shaw Festival — but there’s little audience volition actually involved, as it’s Fry (and presumably Carroll) who control the categories and the questions. Total respect to Fry for remembering all the material that he does, and in principle I understand the desire to offer breaks in the structure, but nonetheless these sequences ended up feeling extraneous, elongating already extended evenings. (Did each performance really need to be two acts?)
The performances also became punishing in terms of their representation of gender. As a woman, I found little of sustenance in story after story about flawed males (gods, heroes, men — all of them), in which women serve as inspiration or provocation thanks to their physical attractiveness or, when they have agency, are in the mode of vindictive temptress. Sure, this may be what’s in the source material, but what’s Fry’s position on this? By repeating without glossing, he’s endorsing.
I’ve heard that at other performances Fry has included comments about how he connects to these stories as a gay man, and I wish we had heard some of that in the press showings. It was hard to square his estimable track record as an LGBTQ advocate with the social conservatism of the material.
On all three nights I attended, the same question arose between me and my companions: What is Fry actually trying to say? Why spend so much time with these stories and ask us to as well?
At the end of Men, he asserts that the gods aren’t dead (and may no longer be necessary) because they live in us, and we exit the theatre to Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” But this humanism is selective and limited, and it doesn’t feel like the seven or so hours of material led up to this conclusion.