Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Where angels fear to tread

By Nehad Selaiha

The Old Testament never tells us how Sarah felt as she watched her husband lead away her only son, Isaac, to the land of Moriah, one fine morning, to offer him as a sacrifice to God. Did she protest, rage and plead or simply bow to the inevitable and meekly submit with the stoical fortitude of the faithful? Did she shrewdly perceive that God was only bluffing, testing Abraham's obedience but would never really take away the gift he had blessed her with after long years of barrenness and when she and her husband were well into old age? Or could it be that she saw it as just retribution for having persuaded her husband to send away his other wife, Hagar the Egyptian, and her son Ishmael so that he may not inherit any of Abraham's wealth? More likely than not, Abraham, who was already a hundred when Isaac was born, never told her to avoid any fuss, and luckily for her, the angel of the Lord arrived in the nick of time to stop the slaughter, substituting a ram for the intended victim.

No such luck for Jephthah's daughter; her father had "promised the Lord: 'If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will burn as an offering the first person that comes out of my house to meet me when I come back from the victory. I will offer that person to you as a sacrifice'" (Judges 11). Even though his daughter and only child was that person, he still fulfilled his vow, and in the case of this poor votive human offering, no angel was at hand to save her. One wonders how Jephthah's wife felt about her daughter being burned alive as an oblation in return for military victory. But on this point, the Old Testament, again, is completely silent.

It is only in Greek tragedy, in Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis which portrays a similar situation and Aeschylus's Agamemnon which treats its consequences, that the feelings of the mother of the ritually sacrificed victim find a place and a voice. Like Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia is sacrificed to the gods for military reasons; to propitiate the goddess Artemis whom he had offended and who, consequently, has withheld the wind, preventing the Greek fleet from sailing to Troy, her father, Agamemnon, the leader of the army, is willing to shed her blood to sail to battle. But, though, like Isaac, she is saved at the last minute by divine intervention and a dying deer replaces her on the altar while she is spirited away to Tauris, she is never reunited with her mother.

Iphigenia, sacrificed to the gods for military reasons

In Euripides's play, Clytemnestra is tricked into bringing her daughter to Aulis with the lure of marrying her to the warrior Achilles. When she discovers the real reason, her reaction clearly shows that she cares not two pins about either the gods or military victory. She cries and pleads, but to no avail, and when a messenger is sent to her at the end to tell her that her daughter was not slain but saved at the last minute and carried away by the gods, and what an honour that was and how she should be proud, she finds cold comfort in his report; she skeptically retorts that what he said was possibly no more than a trumped up story to lighten the burden of her grief. When Ariane Mnouchkine directed the play as part of her memorable quartet, Les Atrides, at her Théâtre du Soleil in 1991, she reduced the messenger's speech to inane babbling by making Clytemnestra lie crumpled on the floor, a silent, lifeless bundle of human grief, beyond any hope of comfort and even beyond skepticism. Hers was the certainty of despair. In his film version of the play, Iphigenia (1976), Michael Cacoyannis had gone a step further and cut out the messenger all together. In both works we encounter a world bereft of all the old comforting myths, where the only realities are slaughter, senseless bloodshed and the ruthless patriarchal war-machine.

Marco Balioani's electrifying and startlingly topical Sakrific‘ which visited Cairo last week, playing twice at Al-Hanager, moves very much on the same lines and is informed by a similar vision. Using Iphigenia in Aulis as skeleton and springboard, it embarks on a daring iconoclastic trip through the ancient alleyways of human memory in search of the roots of brutality and violence, leaving in its trail a string of exploded myths. In a note in the programme, Baliani writes: "After all the massacres, the carnage, what remains on the battle field are fragments of broken young lives. It is always the fathers who send their sons to war. In the myth of Saturn, the father devours his own children fearing they will destroy him in future... Eventually, however, it is the young themselves who accept and assert human sacrifice as an act of heroism and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause without realising the vicious, perverse mechanism which controls it. What follows is familiar: the medals, the testimonials, a few words on a tombstone for future memory, memorial rhetoric soon forgotten and faded photographs of lost young lives. But the shepherds of the nation, the hangmen, are always very much alive and in perfect health and continue to rule exactly because and in the name of those very sacrifices." A little later on he says: "Even today, we still kill each other in the name of God or some other deity. And so, atrocities and abominable abuses are blessed and sanctified."

The play begins with a dead sea and no wind in the sails of Agamemnon's ships, and ends with a vast graveyard, extending to the horizon and no wind for the Lord's angel's wings to soar on. Both images are projected on a number of screens blocking the whole space between the stage floor and the flies. Those screens, with the images constantly flashing on them, and a small pile of stones, a piece of tree trunk and a white sheet as the only props, made up the whole set, designed by Maurizio Agostinetto, providing the live action with a visually vivid and highly evocative background, often engaging it in silent dialogue, complementing and intensifying its significance and emotional charge or ironically undercutting it. Dense black forests, brooding trees, harsh, rocky mountains, desolate seascapes, smoky skies at sunset or dawn enveloped the stage in a miasmic aura and alternated with stunning and deeply disturbing visual metaphors which scorched themselves deep into the memory -- a large profile of a woman, bleached and frozen in a silent scream, floating in midair, face down, filling the whole sky overhead like an imminent curse; a shrivelled, mummified human head, with the teeth grotesquely jutting out from the sunken cheeks in a horrible grin; pathetic, tortured human hands with the dry skin peeling off the knuckles. Though powerful in themselves, those photographic masterpieces would not have had that tremendous impact if they had not been woven into the action as essential constitutive elements and dramatically active signifiers. The same applies to every other element in the play: the minimalist verbal text delivered in four languages (Italian, French, Albanian and Arabic); the clean, economical, sharply defined and richly suggestive movements and gestures; the stunningly original and evocative choreography by Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni which draws on a variety of sources, including the worlds of birds and beasts, wrestling, street fights, hopscotch, American showbiz and rock-and-roll; the lurid sound-track, by Luigi Cinque, which combines in an almost hypnotic melange modern tunes, a variety of natural and man-made quotidian sounds (e.g., the sharpening of a knife on a flint stone), vaguely familiar old chants and Mediterranean folk tunes, the noise of modern industrial cities, and primordial cries and ululations; and last, but not least, Daniela Cernigliaro's costumes which, alternately primitive and modern, austerely simple or gorgeously elaborate and ornate, wove a delicate, subtle thread linking the past with the present.

With such a wealth of varied material and a biblical story constantly crossing and recrossing one from Greek legend, often blending with it and generating new ambivalent double signs, the play could have disintegrated and fallen into chaos. Baliani, however, is a master of design and orchestration. The material is firmly set in a clear ritualistic mode and flows along an intricate pattern of overlapping cycles; each cycle, or unit of scenes, carries traces and echoes from the previous one and replays them in new variations, expanding the story's significance and charging it with contemporary meaning.

From the quiet, low-key and familiar (except for Agamemnon's vaguely modern military coat) beginning to the startling end, the play moves smoothly, at a cunning, spiralling rhythm, carrying us up the ladder of times through a variety of intense emotional states and feelings, conveyed in deeply stirring images, towards the present and its final devastating revelation. A series of unforgettable scenes pave the way for this revelation. These include the modern-dress ball scene where an innocent, care-free courting-dance slowly gathers menacing shadows, perceptibly grows more violent and ends up very much like a gang-rape, with the once lively body of Iphigenia thrown around like a limp rag-doll. A bridge of small stones is built by the male dancers across an imaginary pool and Iphigenia has to cross it. Once she has done that, she stands completely still and lifeless while the young men dress her up as an ancient goddess and lift her up high on their shoulders, after touching every part of her body for blessing, disappearing with her in the shadows. In the next scene, the young men are grotesquely dressed to look like the goddess they have just manufactured and perform a burlesque version of the same courting-dance, but this time without Iphigenia. When suddenly one of the screens is raised to reveal her dead body, they cannot face the reality that rather than raised to heaven, she was actually killed. They go mad and dementedly drag the body, holding it up and screaming at it to repeat the slogans that usually celebrate the death of martyrs. Iphigenia's body in this scene seemed inscribed with all the suffering of humanity throughout history, and the previous elaborate ritual of her sanctification, iconisation, or, indeed, mummification, now appears as a sinister, brutal farce.

Clytemnestra's grief is equally shattering in its impact. She rushes in, in her homely, grey dress, looking distraught, then slowly bends backwards with her arms limply hanging over her head, and all of sudden, hurls her torso violently forward, like the crack of a whip, and viciously punches her thighs, womb and breast. Then, as if unable to remain still any longer, she starts running backwards, in frenzied circles, until she finally collides with Agamemnon. For a minute, she rigidly locks him in her arms then wrenches off his military coat, tears open his trousers and pulls them down to his knees and repeatedly rushes backward and forward between this still, ludicrous, utterly quashed and mortified figure and the small pile of stones Iphigenia had stood upon earlier, dressed as a goddess, fetching stones and dropping them down his pants after spitting on them. When the load finally brings him to his knees, she leaves. He stays completely still in his ridiculous squatting position, then picks up a stone, stuffs it in his mouth and proceeds to speak. But what comes out are eerie, lugubrious sounds, as if issuing from a hollow cave, or from beyond the grave. The sounds continue even as he is carried away by his soldiers, still in his crouching position. When we see him next, he is upright, facing Iphigenia, as we first saw her, across the stage, and is surrounded by at least five tableaux vivants representing Abraham raising the knife over the prostrate Isaac. The five Isaacs plead in different tongues for the angel of the Lord to come and save them. After a momentary blackout, the angel appears in a spectacular manner. He is Agamemnon, but naked and divested of his military suit, with two gigantic wings sprouting from his shoulders and filling the whole stage. Then, suddenly, in a stunning coup de théâtre, the wings detach themselves from his shoulders and trail back to their normal place. They were only two of the back drapes, projected over with blown-up photographs of wings. Instead of the wings, we now discover a pair of crutches. When this fallen, crippled mock-angel turns his back to us and hobbles away, we see clearly where he is heading. The back screens display a gruesome image of desolate wilderness dotted with grave stones under a silent, bleak sky. The Lord's angel is no more than a repentant ex-general and a cripple. Anxious to atone, he tries at the last minute to take on the role of the absent angel, but, tragically, it is too late; the world has become one big cemetery. We leave Agamemnon, the symbol of the war-machine, the engineer and sole survivor of the universal holocaust, gazing at the ruins of the world.

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