The Furies Variations

Directors' Notes

The Oresteia is a formidable epic, full of revenge and dead Greeks. We couldn’t get any dead Greeks to come and see our show, so we had to adapt it significantly from the original. This involved a process of devising with the actors, based on Aeschylus’ themes and characters, relating them back to our own experiences and identities in contemporary Hong Kong society.

“A just society can’t be achieved simply by maximising utility or by securing freedom of choice. To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to disagreements.” - Michael Sandel

In our process we have been trying to emulate some of Sandel’s conclusions about justice, challenging one another’s beliefs about morality, religion, and how to live. A common element we found between the Oresteia, our own experiences, as well as other philosophical sources is that the family is central to our development of a sense of justice, forming a microcosm of how justice is enacted on a larger scale in society. When the most pressing issues of our time cannot even be discussed between different generations in the same family, then coming to a consensus on what is ‘just’ on a larger scale is unthinkable.

Music

When confronted with epically long books Homer’s Odyssey or Aeschylus’ Oresteia, it’s easy to forget that what we are looking at on the page was at the time the height of popular music. We know that Euripides was considered way ahead of his time in terms of his avant -garde composition. There’s a story in Plutarch about how a group Athenian prisoners were able to earn food and drink when captured in Syracuse by singing Euripides’ latest songs. Music has a way of rendering the epic scale of tragedy more accessible and palpable, adding a level that translates across cultures and time.

Greek Theatre

In its golden age from the 5th to the 4th century BC, it was said that Athens spent more money on its theatre than its fleet. The theatre was a place to discuss important issues of the time, with playwrights using the stories of heroes and from their semi-mythical past as a metaphor for the urgent societal issues of the time. Theatres often served as an alternative site for public debate, and mass engagement with theatrical performances was thought to promote the kind of the deliberative reason, critical judgement, and civic values necessary for participating in a democratic society.

Most of the text you hear has come from the group of collaborating actors, writing and rewriting. We’d like to thank them for all their efforts and sharing, as well as the whole creative team, and others who have supported us to make this show possible.