Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Avant-Garde Epic: Robert Wilson's Odyssey and the Experimental Turn

2013; Boston University; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2013.0021

2327-6436

Justine McConnell,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Avant-Garde Epic: Robert Wilson’s Odyssey and the Experimental Turn JUSTINE McCONNELL Robert Wilson is famous for his disparagement of “the text,” for his desire to break free from the strictures of the written word and compel his audience to engage with performance on a different level. So it was with some trepidation, and a sense of irony, that I began to watch his production of the Odyssey, now (as I write) moved from Athens to Milan.* For the play opens with Homer’s prologue , recited in ancient Greek—so far, so good: I feel on relatively safe ground. It continues in modern Greek, and this is the language with which it will remain throughout. But in Milan, the majority of the audience are not following the spoken word with their ears, but are, rather, reading the surtitles projected above the performance space. I find myself referring to the surtitles too, and using them to recall Simon Armitage’s English translation which I had re-read only that morning. For behind the spoken modern Greek and the projected Italian surtitles is Armitage’s version, written for radio and first broadcast by the BBC in 2004, and now translated into modern Greek for Wilson’s production. All this translation (from ancient Greek to English, to modern Greek, to Italian) may leave us wondering why Wilson chose Armitage’s text. Of course, the American director would naturally have gravitated towards an English translation of Homer’s epic poem. Even the task of having that translation translated into modern Greek (by Yorgos Depastas ) and into Italian (by Isabella Babbucci) for this collabo- *Odyssey, April 2–24, 2013, Piccolo Teatro Strehler, Milan, Italy; October 26, 2012, National Theatre of Greece, Athens, Greece. arion 21.1 spring/summer 2013 ration between the National Theatre of Greece and Milan’s Piccolo Teatro did not daunt him (though the decision not to choose a modern Greek translation in the first place may have ruffled some feathers, particularly in a production by Greece’s National Theatre, and especially at a time when the country’s financial struggles are taking a toll on national morale—certainly the vast cost of the production came in for criticism in some quarters of the Greek press).1 Armitage’s Odyssey, as Oliver Taplin described it in a review for the Guardian newspaper back in 2006, “belongs to the rattling good yarn school of Homeric retellings.”2 It is also not exactly a translation, but more of an adaptation: written for performance, it dispenses with lengthy descriptive passages, or even with lengthy speeches, and moves along at a cracking pace. Derek Walcott’s stage version, written in 1992 and performed that same year by the RSC, did—on the surface—something similar. Indeed, Walcott’s version is so condensed that it comes in at just a little over half the length of Armitage’s. However, Walcott succeeded where Armitage has failed: for Armitage’s rendition loses much of the nuance and beauty of the Homeric epic. This is nowhere clearer than in Odysseus’ meeting with Alcinous and Arete on Scheria, when he almost immediately declares that he is Odysseus;3 my heart sank in just the same way that it did at the opening scene of Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1997 made-for-television version, where Odysseus is seen hurtling over the Ithacan landscape towards Penelope, who is calling his name as she gives birth to Telemachus. Identity, we gather, in both Konchalovsky and Armitage, is not going to be a concern; yet surely that is one of the central preoccupations of the Homeric epic and one of its most engaging themes. To its advantage, however, is the pace of Armitage’s adaptation and the simplicity of its language. The latter, in particular, is likely to have appealed to a director wishing that his audience engage with the whole performance (the Gesamtkunstwerk) and not give undue notice only to the word. Armitage’s translation does not distract with linguistic avant-garde epic 162 complexity, which in turn leaves Wilson freer to engage the audience’s attention with the visual, before them on stage. In adapting the Odyssey for performance, and in reducing it...