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Hecuba was performed in the Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival and directed by Lynne Parker, who had directed The Trojan Women many years ago. Hecuba was the wife of King Priam during the Trojan War making her the queen of Troy. Some of her nineteen children are the main characters in the epic Iliad by Homer, such as Paris and Hector. Iliad was created during the Archaic Greek period—8th century bc to the second Persian invasion of Greece, 480bc  when the Greek population vastly increased leading to a sort of social structuralism when Greece drew political maps. The Homerian poem portrayed the final weeks and  consequences of ten years of Troy under siege by Greek states, the battle between Agamemnon and Achilles. She appears for five or six times in the Iliad—her final part is the lamentation over Hector’s death, one of her most famous speech when she loses her son for war—Book 22, The Death of Hector when Achilles drags the dead body of Hector in front of Priam and Hecuba who are in tears. The play, Hecuba, was firstly written by the Greek playwright Euripides around 424bc in which he relates the aftermath of the Trojan War and the fallen city of Troy queen’s grief. There is a metaphysical sense since the ghost of Polydorus explains how he was on the shores of the Chersonese peninsula of Thrace. Besides, Hecuba was also mentioned in other works such as Dante’s Inferno Book XXX. After hundreds of years, Marina Carr re-imagined and, perhaps, deconstructed the unavoidable tragic circumstances of Hecuba, first published in 2015. 

Hecuba and Polyxena

https://mythology.net/greek/heroes/hecuba/ 

The response on Hecuba was somehow controversial. Some people loved it, some people hated it. After innumerable conversations with some people who attended, most people who did not like it felt ‘misplaced’, ‘confused’, or ‘did not understand the story’. Interestingly, the feeling of not recognizing, understanding, or applying what is being perceived by some audience members was impulsively categorized as a negative response, or ‘hate’. Which is not a general statement as one of the conversations was with a Greek classics expert and the person was ‘unsure’ whether it was ‘great or not’. Another point that was heard was the assumption of ‘irrelancy to contemporary Ireland’. Does everything that we see on Irish stage need to be crystal clear, linguistic precise, a pure mimetic representation of the contemporary zeitgeist of the Irish land? Does theatre need to fulfill the need of people to recognize the self onstage? Or could it also portray the other, expand horizons and portray a ‘humanitarian experience’, an abstract and vague idea of what happens outside the box? Perhaps. There was a very informative note on the programme by the director on Hecuba (the reader may find a fragmentation of this on: https://dublintheatrefestival.ie/programme/event/hecuba). The audience members were introduced to the idea of what is happening globally, not only in Ireland. 

The audience members go into the arena-like space and see the characters as one of them, the costumes are also modern. The stage is raw and elementary, it is not extravagant. It welcomes the audience to use their imaginations, to create, to fill the gaps. Presumably, theatre-goers and practitioners could relate to the semioticity onstage. In other, very condensed, words, the use of one object that signify something else. Which is a theatre research module, and practical. There is also a sense of displacement of the characters throughout the performance—as they are characters and observers. This was a bit problematic, because people could shift focus from the performance to what the other performers were doing, such as drinking water, shaking their legs, preparing to re-enter, watching the scene, etc. It could be intentional, as if it was another mystified meaning that the audience and the characters are at times in the same comfort zone, but everything could also happen to them. Or, it was not… Let’s leave it up to interpretation. Meanings…

Going back to the feeling of confusion noted, language structure and plot. A good few people commented on the fact that the characters spoke on the first-person and third-person which created distance, disconnection and avoided sensationalism, and perhaps, engagement. Hecuba’s grief and urge for revenge was no longer there as the epic version of it. Yet, there was a more approachable, maybe realistic, notion of pain and suffering: that there is no space for tragedy and suffering in the contemporary world, one must go on. This notion could be connected to the fact that the world seems to distantiate from Syria and many other places, people are too busy with their lives to stop for a second and see the mass suffering of millions of others, there is a lack collectiveness. The word sensationalism here may be applied as journalistic integrity—the characters are portraying facts, they are not in search for a cathartic emotional experience. They show the raw, elementary reality of the world today, subtly, using a classic. Even though some people thought the story was not approachable, Marina Carr’s Hecuba was digested and simplified in comparison to Euripides, making a classic a bit more accessible.