The Gift of the Gorgon
By Peter Shaffer
Sydney Theatre Company
Reviewed by Helen Jarvis
"Set aside what anyone thinks of the play, it does ask a serious question. Perhaps the most serious question you can ask of a civilisation. Do you think that there is such a thing as an unforgivable act?" So comments celebrated British playwright Peter Shaffer on this, his latest play. Shaffer poses this question in a magnificently taut and tense drama, weaving together ancient Greek myths with a very modern clash of values and personalities.
Set in playwright Edward Damson's study on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) following his death, the play takes the form of recall and retelling of their life together by his widow (the academic Dr Helen Jarvis) to his son Philip (who never knew his father, but who writes and teaches about him in an American university).
As Helen speaks, the scenes are recreated — back to their violent first meeting on the steps of a Cambridge library, married life in an English bed-sit as Helen worked to support Edward's writing (with 50 plays started and not a single one completed — her sacrifice of her own career for his is a subplot and makes Helen a foil to the fierce mythological females in the play), to his blockbuster successes and then to the island where his ennui and total selfishness played themselves out in awful tragedy.
Damson concentrates on the most extreme and challenging examples of human right and wrong and of revenge for past wrongs. His first challenge to Helen was as he performed Clytemnestra's "Dance of Rightful Stamping", which he imagines her performing in triumph following her murder of Agamemnon to avenge his slaying of their daughter, Iphigenia, offered to the gods for victory against Troy. Was she right? Did the second killing in any way undo or compensate for the first, or did it simply continue the cycle, with Clytemnestra herself later slain in the next round of revenge?
His plays focused on similar gruesome acts of vengeance: Byzantine Empress Irene's blinding of her son for his damage to religious icons she had defended; the mutilation of Cromwell's body by restorationists; and the killing of 11 people in an IRA bombing in Enniskillin. As we see these scenes discussed and even enacted, there recurs the image of Perseus, tormented by the conflicting demands to slay the Gorgon Medusa to free the world of her scourge, and to show mercy.
In an electrically charged scene, Edward defends these acts of revenge as pure and noble: "Take from these murderers the life they have violated — and feel it returning into you".
Helen responds: "The truest, most noble passion isn't stamping and geeing ourselves up. It's refusing to be led by rage when we most want to be. That means every time a bomb goes off, yes, and every time a baby is killed, and every other filthy thing that makes you sick with fury. Stubbornly continuing to say 'No' to blood."
Edward puts Helen's values to the most extreme test in the final moments of his life, just as Philip is tested in how to respond to knowledge of his father as human being, not hero.
The Gift of the Gorgon was first performed just over a year ago by the Royal Shakespeare Company and is now playing in the splendid Sydney setting of the Wharf Theatre. The strong cast received a standing ovation. Sandy Gore was particularly outstanding as Helen, with William Zappa as Edward, Paul Goddard as Philip and Ron Hadrick and John Krummel as the fathers of Helen and Edward.
The direction, by Wayne Harrison, is magnificent, and I can guarantee a riveting and wrenching three acts played at high tension throughout, truly reminiscent of a rendition of Aeschylus' trilogy itself.