Angelopoulos begun his exploration of the Cycle of the Atreidae with The Reconstruction. In The Travelling Players, his Agamemnon has (re)turned home from the Anatolian coast not a triumphant king but—much like Menelaus in Euripides’ Helen—a ragged shell of a man forced into migration and a nomadic life. Both iterations of the sons of Atreus (more than two thousand years apart) come at a time of militarist destruction. Every year during the Great Dionysia, ancient Athenians would take their seat at the theatre of Dionysus, on the slope of the Acropolis, to watch the plays whose ending they were already well aware of. Everyone knew of Agamemnon’s return to Mycynae, of Clytaimnystra’s treachery and Orestes’ revenge. They even knew of what had taken place before that in order for the mechanisms of viricide and matricide to be set in motion. They knew of Iphigeneia’s sacrifice, of Atreus’ horrific sin and of the cursed genus of the Tantalidae.
This is what one experiences when watching the epos of The Travelling Players. During a freezing winter dawn, Agamemnon stands against a whitewashed wall with ‘E.A.M.’ (the initials of the greek communist resistance) scrawled on it. He is facing a German firing squad. ‘Εγώ ήρθα απ’ τη θάλασσα από την Ιονία. Εσείς από πού ήρθατε;’ (I came from beyond the sea, from Ionia. Where did you come from?). An ancient greek tradition of announcing one's identity when greeting a stranger, dating back to Homer. It is gut-wrenching and it reaches from beneath sheets of covered history straight from the depths of four hundred years of slavery into the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the harrowing succession of dictatorships and foreign occupation that altered the face of the country. This spatio-temporal osmosis grants a dialectical framing of history’s flow. Battling forces, conflicting ideas and collective experiences co-exist within each tableau and character. Ancient greek drama becomes a national narrative as told by individuals and the Chorus’s interjections. A place of memory cast in the discontinuity of history. The movement in the tableaux is reminiscent of Kurosawa’s, though this time distinct formations are employed to exemplify political tectonics. The presentation of the group as an organism renders them meaninglessness. Metonymies in a Karaghiozis shadow play, they amount to nothing more than the foreground of their socio-historical possibilities. Individuals that attempt to take destiny into their own hands but fail when something larger than the self intervenes. When the super-ego has annihilated the ego, one can no longer recognise their own story of the self. An existential displacement of monumental dimensions.
When we discuss post-modernism in theatre, we speak of absent realism, of history misplaced. For The Travelling Players it is Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt that provides the means for this disturbance. Characters enter and exit through one text into the other, all while traversing through historical webs. The spatial irregularities create a stage for a play within a play within a play; a narrative en abyme. Three medium-shot monologues serve as punctual choruses to the film’s historical tragedy (as close as Angelopoulos ever allows himself to get to a close-up). The quintessence of the Brechtian aesthetic of segmentation.
In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Erinyes (chthonic goddesses more ancient than any Olympian, sworn to punish sacrilege) relentlessly pursue Orestes. The goddess Athena then suggests, that it is the Athenian citizens that should listen to both sides of the argument and vote accordingly for Orestes’ punishment. The son of Atreus is found not guilty, and the ‘Erinyes’ (Furies) transform into protectors of justice, rather than vengeance, appealed to now as ‘Eumenides’ (Kindly Ones). Oresteia—as delivered to us by the tragics—concludes with the establishment of democracy and the court of Aeropagus. So the question arises: where is Aeropagus in Angelopoulos’ Oresteia? Ηistory is still in flux: ‘Ελευθερία ανάπηρη πάλι σας τάζουν.’ (They promise you again a mutilated freedom). Chrysothemis' son disrupts the facade of a resolution dragging the bridal tablecloth across the empty stage. The Junta generation will carry on the protest. We sway backwards and forwards in simultaneous circularity. The myth of the Atreidae is already there before history begins. The killing is inscribed in the names. Somewhere between Brecht and tragic predestination, history as dialectics exists in the absolute present of the dramatic moment. The famous bookends of the film synchronise all presented temporalities, reviewing them beyond pathos and tragedy. It is the Kuleshov effect at its purest form; a palimpsestic panorama transpiring though History.
‘– Τι κάνεις μπαμπά; – Σαπίζω.’ (–How are you dad? –I am rotting). To speak of a national psyche is to reveal the daunting experience of a thousand conflicts breathing under the same sky, stepping onto the same soil. The frightening memory of trauma felt but not articulated. Around Greece, you’ll still notice street art of the word ‘βασανίζομαι’ (I am suffering). History laid bare in the enormous weight of its past; the writing on the wall still visible as an enduring witness.