WORLD PREMIERE
Stephen Fry goes deep in order to turn teaching into great entertainment Stephen Fry as himself in Mythos: Gods. The other instalments in the trilogy are Heroes and Men.
Stephen Fry brings his Mythos Trilogy to the stage at the Shaw Festival,
This is Part 1 of Karen Fricker’s three-night Mythos diary.
And we’re off! One of the most high-profile — and unusual — events of this summer theatre season is underway: three consecutive nights of performance in which a man sits in an armchair for two-plus hours at a go, talking about Greek mythology.
That man is the world-famous polymath Stephen Fry: actor, author, early tech adopter, LGBTQ activist, mental-health spokesperson, cancer survivor, atheist, pundit and beloved of many for delivering a certain brand of brainy English drollness.
The Mythos trilogy is having its world premiere at Shaw Festival thanks to Fry’s friendship with artistic director Tim Carroll, who recounts in a program note how he discovered the joys of learning and hard work through Homer. Carroll had “the same tingling feeling” when Fry proposed a stage adaptation of his bestselling book Mythos. While each night stands as a discrete performance (first Gods, then Heroes, then Men), it’s packaged as a three-night event, and I’m bringing differ- ent companions each night to help me assess various aspects of the experience.
First up: a classicist — my academic colleague Adam, an expert in ancient Greek drama and mythology. He’s impressed with Fry’s acumen: “He’s clearly someone who loves this material and knows it really well.”
The first half of Gods treats the creation of the world out of chaos by the primordial gods Gaia and Ouranos. If you’ve read My
thos or listened to the audiobook, this will be familiar — but Fry adds a few local references, as when he includes icewine in his listing of the “long chain of creation” that also includes (in the book version) “pelicans and penicillin … love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.”
In doing so, Fry joins a centuries-long tradition of retelling these stories “both for the gods and for local audiences,” says Adam.
This first act is, by Adam’s assessment, about 80-per-cent derived from Hesiod’s Theogo
ny, one of the first written accounts of Greek mythology. Although he’s a Hesiod fan, Adam acknowledges that reading him can be boring, full of interminable lists. He credits Fry for his bringing out the “life and humour,” which is “very submerged in Hesiod.”
Fry, by contrast, really knows how to spin a yarn, and his memory is extraordinary: he rattles off complicated names and genealogies with skill and seems at ease throughout the two-act evening.
We still see traces of Fry’s and Carroll’s schoolboy humour in his repeated return to the gross-out detail of Kronos castrating his father Ouranos and throwing his genitals, dripping with blood and sperm, across the Grecian landscape — as well as in his acting out of Kronos barfing up the babies that he had previously devoured, who become gods including Hades, Poseidon and Demeter. (Kronos’s other kid Zeus avoided getting eaten, which was the first clue that he was going to be the boss of them all.)
The audience, always attentive, is at its most vocally appreciative when Fry offers lessons in etymology — as when he connects the word uranium to Ouranos, who was banished to the deepest underworld. There’s a satisfied “hmmm” from spectators as they make these connections, and this seems to affirm the role that Fry carves out for himself — the big-hearted smart guy who makes us feel smarter without shaming us for not knowing stuff in the first place.
Adam and I recognize what Fry is doing, because we aspire to do it ourselves: he turns teaching into entertainment through the skill by which he tells history as a great story.
The second half, which charts the origins of mankind, sees Fry working from a number of sources — Ovid, Aesop and the Homeric hymns, as well as Hesiod.
It has more of a grab-bag feel, and some of the stories seem chosen and spun with inclusivity in mind. The way in which he narrates the origins of ethnic diversity into the story of Prometheus’s creation of mankind was unfamiliar to Adam; and the little-known story of the romance of Dionysus and the handsome satyr Ampelos is clearly included to honour same-sex desire.
Given this, the production hit a sour note with Fry’s assertion that he’s telling stories of “our ancestors” without acknowledging the Eurocentric bias of that statement.
It is surprising that someone so intellectually and spiritually curious would not acknowledge Canada’s Indigenous history, and this feels particularly egregious given that Fry and Carroll are English. It’s Colonialism 101, lads, and so far you’re failing.
The biggest question still nagging at me — and it’s an obvious one — is whether this counts as theatre, and whether that matters. A lot of what’s being worshipped here is celebrity, with Fry its god incarnate, and audiences are ready to pay top dollar to breathe the same air as him. Although three-show packages can be purchased for as little $135, single tickets for individual performances can cost upwards of $280, and some shows are already sold out. For part 2, I’m taking in He
roes with friends who revere Fry for his gay activism, so I anticipate a lot of love. I’m holding off on a star rating until the whole extravaganza is finished.