Ivo van Hove’s latest epic – 3 hours 45 minutes including interval – for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam – is based on six tragedies by Euripides and one by Aeschylus. The subject matter is the Trojan War and the fall of the House of Atreus, a story of murder and revenge.
The senseless killings continue over successive generations. A father murders his daughter. His wife takes a lover while he is away at the war and they kill him on his return. Her children kill her and her lover and the children are then killed for killing them. And so, it goes on and on, unending.
Van Hove does for these ancient Greek classic plays what he did for Shakespeare’s History Plays and Roman Tragedies. It’s important, he says, to play these stories in our present day. The actors perform in Dutch with English subtitles. It doesn’t feel like 3 hours 45 minutes at all.
The set is like a big wide stage at a rock festival. The production, vocally, visually and physically, is thrilling. The stage often fills with smoke. There is a doom metal music soundtrack. Drums are beaten. The strobing and flashing lights are intense and frenetic. The images projected on a huge screen are awesome. Cities burn. The choreography is primal and created for non-professional dancers.
The second half is devoted to Elektra and Orestes. The inhumanity continues. Horror follows horror, savage, gruesome, barbaric. The audience was audibly shocked when Elektra cut off dead Aegisthus’s penis.
Who’s to blame for starting the War? Helen is for eloping with Paris; but ultimately it is the gods who are culpable. It was the goddess Artemis who insisted on Agamemnon sacrificing his young daughter Iphigenia, the price for the wind the Greek army so badly needed to set sail for Troy.
The War lasted 10 years. Troy was completely destroyed. All the men were killed. The women were enslaved. 2,500 years on, nothing has changed. It would be impossible to watch Age of Rage and not think of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the enormous loss of life and destruction of towns and villages that this has brought.
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