Restless feeling
Pauline Knowles’ star performance is a highlight of a radical new version of Oresteia. The actor talks to Susan Mansfield
HISTORY has not been kind to the women in classical drama. Not only do they often suffer unspeakable tragedy, they tend to get the blame for it too. Take Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: she has gone down in history as a harridan murderess, but there’s been a tendency to ignore the small print – that her husband sacrificed their daughter to the gods, abandoned her for ten years, cheated on her, and then came home expecting to be welcomed.
Zinnie Harris’s radical new version of the trilogy, This Restless House, which attracted five-star reviews when it was performed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow last year and is now being revived for the Edinburgh International Festival, sheds fresh light on the women of the play. Harris has taken what she describes as “received characters, often delivered to us as evil or mad” and made them flesh and blood women, complex and imperfect, in the words of Scotsman theatre critic Joyce Mcmillan “stunning female archetypes for our time”.
Chief among them is Clytemnestra, played by Scottish actress Pauline Knowles, who has been garlanded with praise for her performance. “So often, women are the devices in the plot, they are the also-rans, the bit parts,” Knowles says, when we meet in a Glasgow coffee shop. “Zinnie has put them front and centre, it’s their story we’re following, and their psychology, we’re trying to understand how they thought and felt, what motivated them to do these things.”
In the first of the three plays, it is Clytemnestra who has a decision to make: how to react to this man who abandoned her when he went to war ten years before. “She’s on the horns of a dilemma,” Knowles says. “She loves this man but he’s betrayed her in the most heinous way possible, sacrificed their daughter, sacrificed the love they had for each other.”
What she decides to do is no secret, but Knowles believes there is more to it than a crime of passion. “Misogyny is not even questioned in that culture. Women are used and abused and traded as chattels. Clytemnestra was married before Agamemnon, and he murdered her first husband and their child. Maybe she’s just had enough.” And women who take events into their own hands rarely get a good press: “All female figures in a position of power, whether fictional or real, can be vilified for seeming strong, being anti-womanly – usually by men, but sometimes by women too.”
Is it a difficult place to go as an actor? “Yes, but as I get older, I find that it’s easier to get angry with injustice, it’s easier to find pain and loss. If you live long enough, you will experience them so they are easier to tap into. Also if the piece is well written, as this is, you don’t have to go mining for it, you just work with the text and it’s there.”
She says that the events of the play, although they feel monumental, even extreme – a man murdered by his wife, a mother by her (in this case) daughter – still sit powerfully in the modern world. “Unfortunately, it rings very true. The violence and destruction are still here, the subjugation of women is still around. Zinnie has written about how violence begets violence, and all you’re left with is a floor covered with bodies and nothing resolved, you have to find another way. At the end of the play, when the child Iphigenia invites everyone to sit