In Ovid's version of this story, there is a particularly gory scene when the heroine's tongue leaps around on the forest floor after her rapist has cut it out.
It is a moment typical of the poet's prematurely gothic sense of the absurd, but there is no such tongue-out-of cheek humour in Joanna Laurens' reworking. In her hands, it has become a tale whose passion leaves scorch marks on the imagination, simultaneously devastating the audience with its eloquence.
Although in some versions of the myth, Tereus acts like a one-dimensional villain on Viagra, for this updated production of Sophocles' play (the Greek original remains only in fragments), he is endowed with the full ambiguity of the tragic hero. It is love, not lust which draws him to Philomela, and when her father Pandion makes him a gift of her sister Procne, he fights like a fly caught in a spider's web against circumstances that might bring Philomela back within his reach.
In her debut piece, Laurens sets the play alight with her linguistic facility. Sometimes she creates exquisite chains of meaning, by making words run in and out of each other like raindrops dripping down a window. The simple word game, "I love you, I'll view ... All of you ...", becomes a menacing poetic text for a seduction scene. Later, after Tereus has raped Philomela and cut her tongue out to silence her, Procne jokes darkly at their reunion, "I'm speaking for two now."
Rebecca Gatward's tightly composed production, with its harshly simple set and carefully nuanced lighting, allows no drop of intensity to escape. Alex McSweeney's smouldering Tereus, combined with Sharlene Whyte and Syan Blake's love-torn vengeful sisters, further stokes up the emotional pressure cooker. The spiky bird-like chorus amplifies every molecule of tension. By the end, the hatred seeps through your skin until - like the wretched Tereus - you feel as if you can taste it.
Three Birds Alighting On A Field
