Waiting for Apollo

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Waiting for Apollo is essentially what would have happened if Antonin Artaud had decided to stage Greek tragedy. Washing Line Productions take the characters of Orestes, Electra, Helen of Troy, and Menelaus and subject them to some heavy-duty remodelling. In doing so, they attempt to balance the extremes of the verbal and the physical, the grotesque and the sublime, the ancient and the twitter-happy modern.

The cast switch constantly between Euripides’ tragic verse and some very colloquial modern English. Electra begins and ends the play by telling her audience and the gods to quite simply “fuck off.” When Apollo (unlike Godot) does appear, he (she? it?) throws out some of Euripides’ finest, alongside psychedelic crackers such as his parting words “Pipe down, pipe dream, piping hot. Peace.”

But Washing Line do not limit themselves to playing with style. When Orestes and Electra are  condemned to death for matricide, the pair hit upon the possibly un-heroic, decidedly novel idea of killing Helen of Troy and kidnapping her daughter in order to pressure her husband Menelaus into arranging their pardon. And then they dance like maniacs.

At the birth of tragedy, audiences were always savvy to the stories and therefore the art was in seeing how each new poet would interpret the age-old tales. The result of Washing Line Productions’ attempt to rub shoulders with Sophocles and Aeschylus is an engaging, fun, suitably absurd hour-long romp.