THYESTES SIMON STONE, BELVOIR INFO CREDITS Foundation, The Keir Foundation, Mark Carnegie and Jessica Block dates co-written by world premiere Mon 23, Tue 24, Wed 25, Thu 26, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Melbourne, 12.9.2010 Fri 27 June 2014 Simon Stone, Mark Winter venue after Seneca Theater Bellevue direction starting time Simon Stone 8.30 pm set and costume design running time Claude Marcos 1 hour 30 minutes, no interval composer and sound design language Stefan Gregory English with Dutch surtitles lighting design introduction Govin Ruben by Cecile Brommer dramaturgy 7.45 pm Anne-Louise Sarks meet the artist stage manager with Simon Stone Karen Faure Tue 24.6, after the performance assistant stage manager moderator Cecile Brommer Isabella Kerdijk website cast www.belvoir.com.au Thomas Henning Chris Ryan Toby Schmitz lighting realisor podcast Chris Mercer https://soundcloud.com/holland- production manager festival Todd Wilson artistic director Ralph Myers HOLLAND FESTIVAL executive director Brenna Hobson production Belvoir originally created by The Hayloft Project commissioned by Malthouse Theatre with thanks to Australia Council for the Arts, Andrew Cameron Family HOLLAND FESTIVAL PARTNERS THYESTES IS SELECTED BY HF YOUNG HF YOUNG IS MADE POSSIBLE BY HOOFDBEGUNSTIGER THE THYESTES OF THE I-POD GENERATION if they are at a party – and talking about things that interest young men nowadays. But there is a continual parallel with the events in the Simon Stone, the young director who has made a name for himself myth, such as at the beginning of the performance when two boys over the last several years with his radical adaptations of great clas- shoot and kill a third (Atreus’s and Thyestes’ murder of their half- sics, is back at the Holland Festival. After his hit production of The brother). Wild Duck last year, the Australian is joining us again with his adap- Apart from that, the violence is mostly suggested; it never beco- tation of Thyestes, for which he transposed Seneca’s classical play to mes bloody on stage and the most horrific deeds take place offstage. his own social environment. This is the prototypical myth of cycles The actors perform the violence that does occur on stage in a deli- of vengeance that are unstoppable. berately unemotional way. Says Stone, ‘The violence is presented as a very normal, almost boring moment because we wanted to show Don’t expect classical verses and lofty dialogue from Simon Stone that the randomness and the mundane nature of violence is the most this time around either. His characters are perfectly normal young horrific thing.’ men that you can encounter in any bar and on every street corner, dressed in hoodies, jeans and athletic shoes. They drink wine, listen The critics were unanimously enthusiastic. ‘Simon Stone’s brave and to music on their iPods and talk as boys do amongst each other, with bold reimagining of Seneca’s bloody tragedy Thyestes is thrilling and the usual nonchalance, bravura, tendency to score points off one astounding,’ declared The Age, which praised the script, direction another and, not least, the requisite eruptions of physical and verbal and acting to the skies. The Australian emphasized that the show violence. among other things was not only ‘confronting’, ‘transgressive’ and ‘obscene rock ‘n roll theatre’ but also ‘uncomfortably hilarious’. The The young Simon Stone (29) has attracted international attention Herald Sun lauded the production as a ‘shocking’, ‘engrossing’ and the past few years with his contemporary adaptations of great clas- ‘superbly realized’ work, although this paper also gave a light war- sical plays. Besides Thyestes, he has for example done Wedekind’s ning to sensitive souls: ‘It’s not for the fainthearted!’ Spring Awakening, Chekhov’s Platonov and Three Sisters, Bertolt Brecht’s Baal and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Last year, we spoke with him in the run-up to his first appearance at the Holland SYNOPSIS Festival with The Wild Duck, in which he moved Ibsen’s story to the present. He said then about his approach to the classics, ‘The great The myth of Thyestes served as material for a tragedy for Greek plays have proved themselves, so they’re perfect to put on stage. But and Roman playwrights who were not the least of them: Homer, you have to do it in your own language, otherwise you won’t be re- Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca. It is accordingly seen cognizable to your audience.’ as the mother of vengeance tragedies. The seed for all the vengeance In order to put these stories into their own familiar language, is planted when Tantalus kills his own son, Pelops, chopping him Stone and his actors first dig into the script and take it apart, analyse up and serving him to the gods at a banquet in order to test whether the characters and find out where there is common ground with they truly are omniscient. The gods immediately discover the ruse themselves. Then they build the play up again, using the language, and Pelops is reassembled and brought back to life at Zeus’s com- gestures and conventions of today. As he said last year, the director is mand. Once Pelops grows up, he arranges to have a king killed so essentially ‘putting the characters in a time machine and transporting that he can marry his daughter. But he later deceives this hard-won them to our world’. Therefore, his actors do not speak in old verses woman just as easily; he leaves her for a younger woman and has an but in contemporary Australian English and as said before, as boys illegitimate son, Chrysippus, with her. amongst boys, recognizable to everyone. Simon Stone’s production starts at the moment when the legal Says Stone, ‘My work in the theatre has been about helping the wife of this King Pelops discovers that her husband has declared that audience see the similarities between themselves and the people on his illegitimate child is heir to the throne. In a rage, she spurs on her stage. These stories are not dusty, distant tales of fantastical goings sons Atreus and Thyestes to kill their half-brother, which they imme- on. They were written by people worried by the same things as us. diately do. As punishment, they are exiled, and their mother commits They’re all about sex and death, and what if someone stole your land suicide. The brothers become kings elsewhere. After a time, Thyestes or killed someone you know? Those are things that piss us off as steals Atreus’s kingdom and sleeps with his wife. To win her back, human beings.’ Atreus starts a war, which Thyestes loses. Atreus then invites Thyes- tes to a banquet, kills Thyestes’ children and serves them to his bro- Simon Stone made Thyestes in 2010 for The Hayloft Project and ther as a meal, just as their grandfather had once served their father the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. The play tells the story of a as a festive meal to the gods. This drives Thyestes insane. An oracle well-nigh endless chain of vengeance and retribution in the family tells him that he must conceive a son with his own daughter, Pelopia, of Tantalus, his son Pelops, Pelops’s sons Atreus and Thyestes and and that this son will later kill Atreus. Thyestes thereupon rapes his Thyestes’ son Aegisthus, who was raised by Atreus. The macabre low daughter in the dark, without her knowing who her assailant is. A point is the moment when King Atreus serves Thyestes the bloody few years later, she encounters Atreus and marries him. She raises heads of his sons during a banquet to get revenge on him, which Aegisthus, the son engendered by her rapist, as Atreus’s son. When drives Thyestes out of his mind. he is big enough, his mother gives him the sword that she stole from Stone says he uses the story to show how ridiculous the culture her rapist that dark night, and tells him that if he finds its owner, he of vengeance actually is. ‘It’s all about ego. Someone saying, “I’ve will know who his real father is. Aegisthus finds Thyestes and disco- been slighted and I cannot find a way to let that lie, so I must do so- vers how badly Atreus acted. He goes back to kill the man who raised mething more horrific than what’s already been done.”’ him. The director uses the classical story as a frame to show how hate, This is where Stone’s production ends, but the cycle of vengeance and jealousy, revenge and violence arise in our own time. Before each killing does not stop here. As a sequel, Aeschylus wrote a famous play scene, a projection screen is lowered to let us know where we are in in which Atreus’s sons Agamemnon and Menelaus continue the chain the classical myth. Once the screen rises again, we see the actors in of revenge and retribution after they return from the Trojan War. a contemporary setting – a white space with florescent lighting, as BIOGRAPHIES Simon Stone (1984) is an Australian actor and theatre director. He is one of the greatest young talents of the Australian theatre. Stone was born in Basel. From there he moved with his parents and his two sisters to Cambridge in the UK and finally to Australia. There he studied at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. In 2007 he founded the independent theatre company The Hayloft Project, where he adapted and directed Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, Chekov’s Platonov and 3xSisters, The Suicide by Erdman and The Only Child, a new version of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf.