Iris Theatre : Alcestis

"stylish production of Greek classic" - Aline Waites - remotegoat (four stars)

"builds towards a measured and satisfying finale" - Stephe Harrop - London Theatre Blog

Apollo - Andrew McDonald (understudy Charles Grant)
Admetos - Shaun French
Alcestis - Sarah Kempton
Death - Seamus Newham
Chorus 1 - Emma Garrett
Chorus 2 - Julie Gilby
Chorus 3 - Anne-Marie Piazza
Maid/Nanny - Christina Gallon
Servant - Elizabeth Boag
Heracles - Matthew Mellalieu
Lichas - Tom Futerill
Iolaus - Tom Deplae
Pheres / God - John Harwood


	Shaun French	Sarah Kempton

Andrew Mcdonald	Seamus Newham	John Harwood

Emma Garrett	Julie Gilby	Anne-Marie Piazza

Tom Duplae	Matthew Mellalieu	Tom Futerill

Christina Gallon	Elizabeth Boag

Theatre Designer - Francensca Massariol
Lighting Designer - Benjamin Polya
Musical Director - Candida Caldicot-Bull
Movement Director - Josephine Lott
Stage Manager - Sara Macleod

Ted Hughes died on 28th Oct 1998, possibly the greatest classical dramatic poet of the 20th Century. A scholar of Shakespeare and Euripides, he had a sensual, visceral connection with the greatest of storytellers. In Alcestis Ted Hughes reaches the pinnacle of his dramatic verse, being both intensely personal and deeply universal in scope. In commemoration of the ten year aniversary of Ted Hughes' death Iris presents his masterpiece Alcestis.

This is the story of a king, Ademetos, who escapes death when his wife volunteers to die in his place. As she dies Ademetus rails against the Gods’ indifference, spurred on by his own guilt.

Into the heart of this tragedy suddenly crashes Heracles, an invader from another story, drunk and full of games. Ademetos cannot turn away his old friend and Heracles turns the palace upside down with his revels. Our tragedy has suddenly turned to farce. The play acting rises to a crescendo of noise until finally the darkness can be held back no more and the truth is revealed to all.

Sobered and shamed by his behaviour Heracles goes down to the underworld, wrestles Death and returns triumphant with the living Alcestis. We have moved from tragedy, through farce and finally emerged into rebirth.

Ted Hughes, started work on this piece in 1993, but only finished it a few months before his death in 1998. What was a translation quickly became a complete re-imagining of the story exploring in a very raw personal way the themes of the play. As Ademetos fights to come to terms with the death of his wife, the verse is startling in its uncompromising honesty.

"stylish production of Greek classic" - Aline Waites - remotegoat on 07/11/08 (four stars)

Time was when the actors church was used only for memorial services for deceased thespians - but now - under the guidance of the Rev Simon Grigg, administrator Charles Grant and director Danny Winder this beautiful Inigo Jones building has become a popular theatrical venue. Currently there is an ambitious production of Alcestis, one of the oldest surviving plays of Euripedes in a translation by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes.

It is a curious plot - indescribable as either tragedy or comedy - it has been called a problem play. Basically Admetos, a popular king approaching death has been granted extra life by Apollo, providing he can find another human being to take his place. His beautiful wife, Alcestis, volunteers to die in his stead, insisting on making the sacrifice for the sake of his children.
We enter the story as Alcestis is being prepared for death. The ailing Admetos bows before Apollo. Alcestis enters dressed in a black robe with three black clad women in attendance.

Apollo takes the heart from the king and places it in the queen's breast. Admetos suddenly has a surge in health just as Alcestis declines. All she asks in return is his promise that after she has gone, he will not marry another wife and give his children to a stepmother who may ill treat them.

The play is directed to be played at full emotional strength which is unusual and surprisingly effective, particularly in the extremely moving death bed scene between Sarah Kempton as Alcestis and her distraught husband played by Shaun French.
As the body of Alcestis is borne out of sight. Heracles, (Mathew Mellalieu) an old friend of Admetos arrives arrives with a bunch of rough friends to provide raucous comedy - and a happy resolution!

The play is in modern dress and there is a minimum of scenery. This is never worrying as the costumes are appropriate and the church is its own setting. The slight acoustic problem affecting rich male voices is being worked on and the acting is overall sublime from veteran John Harwood as Pheres the father, to the three girl youthful chorus who do not speak in unison but are all individual personalities.

The action is punctuated by music from two violinists and occasional songs from the chorus.

A satisfying experience, to be recommended!

This is the earliest surviving play by Euripides (though not his first, for when first produced in 438BC he was in his mid forties and had already been writing for many years). It is not quite what you may expect of a Greek tragedy for it introduces comic elements and has a happy ending. Ted Hughes's lively translation gives this some emphasis but also seems coloured by his own personal marital history.

Alcestis is a wife who offers her own life to preserve that of her husband, King Admetos, who is otherwise fated to die young. As her funeral rites are about to begin Admetos' friend Heracles arrives and the king, following the laws of hospitality, orders that he be taken to another part of the palace and entertained, hiding Alcestis' death from him. Heracles finds out the real situation and sets off for the underworld to get Alcestis back.

Daniel Winder's production puts the play in modern dress and uses Inigo Jones's church as a simple space with choir seats moved to provide a wide playing area with only a screen lightly splattered like a Pollock painting providing a concealing space in front of the altar. It opens very formally with a solid looking, casually dressed middle-aged man ritually marking a circle of salt or silver sand onto the pavement of the choir and bisecting it with a cross before an ailing Admetos, dressed in gold-braided naval uniform and making his way with the help of a stick, and a veiled Alcestis come to kneel before him. With a blow to the belly he seems to rip what might have been a heart from the king's body, then strikes Alcestis abdomen too. I thought at first this was some sort of symbolic organ transplant - but this was the wrong way round, it must be a symbol for sickness and death itself. Alcestis falls and is carried off and Admetos stands and goes. The officiant then reveals himself as the god Apollo, who has gained Admetos his life, provided someone will go with death instead. That concession won he then argues with death to try to save Alcestis too.

Andrew McDonald doesn't look like the golden-haired sun god, but that's probably he's in disguise, banished from Olympus to be Admetos' shepherd as a punishment, but his delivery has authority and sets a pattern for some splendid speaking from the whole company who seize the verse and deliver it with power, though sometimes with more volume than is compatible with the resonance of the building. Familiarity with the space may solve this problem for later performances. Shaun French's Admetos is a played with particularly force and passion. He becomes snarlingly vicious when, at Alcestis funeral, he turns upon his father Pheres for not offering his old life instead. John Harwood offers a contrasting cameo as Pheres, form hiding self-interest, sardonic and wryly humorous.

The arrival of Heracles, accompanied by guitar-playing friends in multi coloured leather, punctures the gravity of Admetos' house and Winder brings them in like a riot. Instead of simply leaving a servant to describe his roistering Hughes has expanded Heracles' role to give him a recital of his fabled labours and here they are acted out in choreographed images that erupt with sly humour in the staging. Matthew Mellalieu is no muscle-bound Heracles, he's a strong man whose figure belies his love of food and wine, but he rapidly sobers up when he learns the true nature of what is happening in the palace and sets out to bring about an ending that has pre-echoes of the happy endings of Shakespeare's late plays.

Sarah Kempton looks lovely as the revitalised Alcestis but, though hers is the title role, the emphasis is on her husband. She spends her time ailing and gracefully fainting. Her moment comes making her farewells to her family and extracting Admetos' promise never to remarry, though this loses some pathos because this version cuts her young children and replaces them with a silent baby.

Literally holding the baby is Christina Gallon's Nanny, another strong and intelligent performance. As well as this female servant, the Chorus are here three female staff of the household, the text divided between them with only a few lines spoken together. Leading them is the strong presence of Emma Garrett who also closes the play. She, along with Julie Gilby and Anne-Marie Piazza, gives the text a sense of natural conversation while still playing with a heightened style of delivery. They are helped by the Yorkshire character of the writing which is lightly accented but adds to the vitality of the whole company's speaking. The chorus are pure voiced vocalists and sing some more ritual passages, which retain the original ancient Greek. These include leading the audience to follow the bier of Alcestis out of the church before the interval. There are also live musicians playing music from Bartok's violin duos to introduce the acts and add atmosphere during the performance.

Working on tight budgets and with carefully managed resources director Daniel Winder and his Iris Theatre are making the Actor's Church into a place to see intelligent and satisfying performance. They have not yet entirely mastered the problems of the space but their work is something to look out for in the future.

"builds towards a measured and satisfying finale" - Stephe Harrop - London Theatre Blog - 7.11.08

Euripides’ Alcestis, a not-quite-tragic Greek tragedy, centres upon a wife’s self-sacrificing decision to die in her doomed husband’s place. Ted Hughes’ version of the play is a visceral and uncompromising meditation on the struggle to live ‘in the same world as death’, to survive and nurture hope in the face of inescapable suffering.

Daniel Winder’s modern-dress production is sometimes impressively liturgical, and sometimes wilfully slow, with flashes of hallucinatory visual excess. A couple of episodes of not-very-passionate dumbshow add little to Hughes’ spare, powerful verse, but some of the show’s other effects work much better, and Alcestis’ funeral procession spilling out into the Covent Garden night is a wonderful collision between worlds.

The chorus of three are gossipy, grudge-bearing neighbours, vulgarly curious beneath their funereal finery. The show’s physical score sometimes pushes these hardworking actresses beyond their comfort and competence, but their singing is glorious, and they tackle the verse with intelligent, northern-vowelled bluntness. Chorus leader Emma Garrett is a figure of compelling authority, stoical, defiant and utterly unglamorous, roughly admonishing Shaun French’s Admetos to ‘meet Necessity with a cheerful face’.

Sarah Kempton as Alcestis is in another world from the beginning, pale and self-possessed and impatient of her husband’s sorrow. John Harwood’s Pheres, doddery, slovenly and incorrigible, makes an unexpectedly eloquent case for an old man clinging to life, and his exchanges with his son over Alcestis’ bier sparkle with a shared sense of grim humour. Christina Gallon and Elizabeth Boag, as Nursemaid and Servant, handle their big speeches with skill, while Matthew Mellelieu and Tom Deplae exploit the hilarity of Heracles’ play-within-a-play to hysterical, discomfiting effect.

The acoustics of The Actor’s Church are distinctly boomy, and the whole company works hard to make themselves heard and understood. Hughes’ gut-wrenching poetry rolls around the cavernous church like rumbling Olympian thunder. And the sacred space is an excellent foil for the play’s howls of bereft despair, and bellows of boozy good-fellowship. Iris Theatre’s Alcestis is an oddly-compounded interpretation of a complicated, tragi-comic drama, but it builds towards a measured and satisfying finale with tragedy, temporarily, averted.

Tues 4th Nov 7.30pm - Gala First Night
Wed 5th Nov 7.30pm
Thur 6th Nov 7.30pm
Fri 7th Nov 7.30pm
Sat 8th Nov 7.30pm
Mon 10th Nov 7.30pm
Tues 11th Nov 7.30pm
Wed 12th Nov 7.30pm
Thur 13th Nov 7.30pm
Fri 14th Nov 7.30pm
Sat 15th Nov 2.30pm - Matinee
Sat 15th Oct 7.30pm - Final Night