When people see their own struggles reflected in ancient stories, something powerful happens The Greek tragedies have something to say to us about the way we live now, and its something we desperately need to hear

Bryan Doerries

Saturday 26 December 2015 00.00GMT

T he playwright Aeschylus wrote in Agamemnon that humans learn through suffering, but for many people today, seeing or reading ancient Greek tragedies feels like self-inflicted suffering with no apparent educational value.

When we hear the words Greek tragedy, our eyes glaze over, conjuring images of histrionic actors in loose fitting sheets and golden sandals, moving in unison, wailing about fate, and crying out to unseen Olympian gods.

Like artefacts on display in a museum, these ancient plays couldnt seem more removed from the concerns of men and women living in the 21st century.

However Greek tragedies have something urgent to say to us now, and its something we desperately need to hear.

We live in a cataclysmic age, our world increasingly torn by war, famine, mass migration, sectarian violence, terrorism, pestilence, and environmental disaster. In spite of the technological advances that have led to unprecedented levels of communication and interconnection across the planet, we are, in some ways, isolated by our devices.

Now, more than ever, we are in need of timeless stories, myths that bring us together in the presence of community and help us face some of the darkest aspects of our humanity.

Athenians during the fifth century BC lived through nearly 80 years of war, as well as a plague that wiped out a third of their population. By depicting the extremities of human anguish, the plays of Sophocles and his contemporaries where designed to communalise these experiences, to evenly distribute the burden of war and other traumas upon the shoulders of all citizens.

The plays were not simply entertainment, but a technology that arose from a need for the collective witness of human suffering. And, like an external hard drive, when plugged into the right audience, the ancient plays still work with startling efficiency.

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Over the past seven years I have directed hundreds readings of Greek tragedies in unlikely places, such as military bases, hospitals, prisons, and drug-ravaged towns for audiences that have been visited by trauma and loss.

When people see their own private struggles reflected in 2,500-year-old stories, something powerful happens. They open up. They quote lines from the plays and relate those lines to harrowing, personal stories. In listening to these stories, I have learned more about the tragedies and what they signify today than from any other source.

In 2008, after a performance of Sophocles Ajax a play about the suicide of a great, respected warrior for an audience of Marines in San Diego, a military spouse leaned into a microphone and said, My husband went away four times to war, and each time he returned, like Ajax, dragging invisible bodies into our house. The war came home with him. And to quote from the play Our home is a slaughterhouse.

In speaking the truth of her experience of war, and by connecting it to an ancient story, she had in effect given permission to all of the other spouses in the audience to stand up and speak their truths. Following a performance of Euripides Bacchae a play about the destructive power of Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication in a rural American town described as ground zero of the opioid epidemic, a local teenager spoke her truth before the community:

I have parents who have been on drugs and who have set a horrible example for my

family, she said, her voice quavering. Im more adult than my parents. They come to me for advice. They want money from me. I am trying so hard, but

The girl leaned into the collective embrace of her high school friends and sobbed, causing many of the older members of the audience to wipe away tears. Euripides play depicts the intergenerational destruction of Dionysus, something with which the citizens of Hazard, Kentucky were all too familiar.

After a performance of Sophocles Women of Trachis a play in which the dying hero Heracles begs his teenage son to help him end his life at Harvard medical school, a hospice nurse approached a microphone and said, Forgive me I feel compelled to apologise to all of the doctors in the audience who do not get to be with their patients when they die. I have a hard job. But I witness miracles every day.

The nurse was not glamourising death. He simply wanted to acknowledge that there was more to medicine than preserving life.

The more I have listened to these audiences respond to Greek tragedies, the more convinced I am of their relevance to our lives. And what I have seen in the faces of audience members night after night is a palpable sense of relief to discover that they are not alone: not alone in their communities, not alone across the world, and not alone across time.

Bryan Doerries is the author of The Theatre of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (Scribe, $29.99)

Page 2 of 3When people see their own struggles reflected in ancient stories, something powerful ...

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