Where:Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London, N1 1TA When: 29th May-18th July 2015, Evenings: 7pm, Saturday matinees: 1pm How long: 3h40 with pauses/an interval of 5m, 15m and 3m How much: £10-£38 Tickets from: the Almeida web site or by calling the box office on 020 7359 4404
Back in the day, a mere 2,500 years ago, Greek tragedies used to be performed in groups of four: a comical satyr play preceded by three regular tragedies – some happy, some sad, despite the name. Those three tragedies were frequently but not always trilogies, but unfortunately only one of these linked trilogies survives: The Oresteia. It was written by the first of the great Athenian playwrights, Aeschylus, and dramatises a story already well known at that time – the story of the great Trojan general Agamemnon, his return home to Greece after the war, his death and the subsequent avenging of that death.
I say well known, but between Homer, Hesiod and other even earlier traditions, it’s not quite clear if there was ever one definite story, with versions surviving in which Agamemnon is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, her lover Aegisthus or both of them. Why do they kill him? Perhaps there was an enmity between Aegisthus’ family and Agamemnon’s. Perhaps it’s because he brought back a Trojan slave girl, Cassandra, with him. Or perhaps it’s because he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia – or was it Iphimede? – to Artemis to atone for sacrilege against her sacred deer and to ensure good winds to sail for Troy.
It is Aeschylus’ own later elaboration on those stories that are the best known. In Agamemnon, the eponymous ruler returns to his kingdom after 10 years in Troy, where he’s killed almost immediately in his bath by Clytemnestra. In The Libation Bearers, their son Orestes returns years later from exile and in collusion with his sister Electra – the subject of her own plays by both Sophocles and Euripides – he conspires to murder his mother. Matricide having been committed, the gods of injustice, the Furies, want their vengeance and in The Eumenides, only the intervention of Athena and her establishment of trials by jury are enough to stop them and to establish a new, kindlier system of jurisprudence.
And then in Proteus, the companion satyr play that no longer exists, following the Trojan War, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus and his wife Helen (of Troy) run aground on the island of the shape-changing sea god Proteus, somewhere off the coast of Egypt, where they are chased around by satyrs looking for sexy time.
Now, the Almeida is mounting a season of Greek tragedies this year dedicated to establishing their relevance to a modern audience and as you can tell from that summary above, as delightful as it all is to people like me, not everyone is going to find the original texts quite as accessible, particularly since a lot of the trilogy is about the changing relationship between mortals and a pantheon of gods in which very few people now believe.
So in this, the first Oresteia of the year, we have a somewhat freeform adaptation of the original text, updated for the present day. And somewhat surprisingly for a trilogy, it comes in four parts.
Apologies for the delayed posting, but work got the better of me last Friday. But here, better late than never, is the weekly round-up. Last week was a little bit special as it gave us the first Wonder Woman Annual since 1999. Exciting, hey? Well, almost.
On top of that, we had the start of the Darkseid War over in Justice League #41, and as we’ve seen already, that’s going to involve Wonder Woman quite a bit. On top of that, Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Four #45 gave us the arrival of some of Wonder Woman’s old friends. Or are they?
And oh yes, Sensation Comics concludes its latest story, for which we’ll revisit the Theseus Paradox. Yay?
Well, one yay, anyway, because in one of those issues, we have, in a couple of throwaway lines, an exploration of the origin of the Amazons in the nu52, as well as Diana’s mission to the outside world. Which issue is it, do you think?
There’s a reason that HBO makes all the best US shows. Lots of reasons in fact. At a basic level, it’s got oodles of cash so it can afford to splurge on high production standards. It’s also a premium cable show, which means that it can show pretty much anything: sex, violence, swearing, drug-taking – whatever it wants, more or less.
But most importantly, it gives TV producers creative control. No network executives monitoring scripts, sending notes, telling the writers to make character x more likeable, character y less gay and situation z less East Coast. Here’s your big pile of money, give us 10 episodes, off you go and don’t come back until you’re good and ready.
Simples.
So naturally Netflix, attempting to burst into the worldwide TV scene and wanting to overturn the idea of Internet TV being cheap and nasty, essentially emulated HBO’s model with its own productions. The slight twist is that it combined the HBO production model with the DVD release model: almost without exception, it’s released all episodes of its shows at the same time, usually on a Friday, so we can binge-watch them over the weekend.
Sometimes this has worked very well, giving us true TV classics such as House of Cards and Daredevil that you almost can’t stop watching as soon as they’re released.
But the model does have flaws, both in terms of production and release. With Grace and Frankie and Bloodline, for example, somebody somewhere needed to tell the shows’ creators that they were spending an awful lot of money on something that wasn’t very good. They really needed a network executive saying character x need to be more likeable, character y more gay and situation z less Florida Everglades. They also needed someone to point out it’s no use structuring a show to be watched in one go, if the individual episodes are so uninspiring, no one can be bothered to watch the next one.
Sense8 is perhaps the epitome of all the flaws of the Netflix model and is so far, quite easily the worst show that Netflix has put out. Two episodes in, it’s getting better, but that’s from a very, very low starting point.
On paper, the show should be good. For starters, it’s created by the Wachowskis, who created and directed The Matrix, and J Michael Straczynski, who’s best known for creating Babylon 5 but was BAFTA-nominated for his script for Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. The Wachowskis are also directing it.
The show itself is essentially Heroes, with strangers around the world waking up to discover they have strange new abilities and that they’re all linked somehow. There’s even a Mohinder-alike (played by Lost/The Buddha of Suburbia’s Naveen Andrews) to go around the world to each of them and explain what’s happening to them.
The main difference between this and Heroes is that rather than be able to fly, have super strength, etc, the sensate ‘sense eight’ can share each other’s senses – they can see, hear, feel, taste, etc, everything that the others experience. They can even tap into each other’s knowledge. Or at least they could if they could understand what they are…
…and each other. Because this is a show that celebrates diversity and empathy. Right from its “look at the wonders of the world and humanity” title sequence through to the end credits of each episode, Sense8 wants you to experience the joys of living from every possible person’s point of view. So the eight include a gay Spanish actor, a Chinese female martial artist/businesswoman, a trans, lesbian San Francisco hacker, a Chicago cop, a young female drug addict DJ who’s down and out in London, an Indian bride-to-be, an African bus driver and more.
All of which is admirable and oodles of cash have been spent to give us worldwide filming. It lacks a little bit of local knowledge, giving us a London filled with Mancs and a penniless girl who manages to live in a bedsit within walking of St Paul’s, but it’s all very lavishly filmed, with the Wachowskis’ typical flair for the visual.
The trouble is that for at least the first episode and a half, not only is all this taken to be sufficient in and of itself, but clearly no one’s told the Wachowskis that maybe they need to be a little bit more disciplined.
There is an attempt to give us a plot, with Andrews, who is himself sensate, trying to protect the Sense8 from someone called Whispers who’s also sensate but killing off the sensate. Or something.
If that previous paragraph sounds ludicrous, that’s because it is and so is the show.
All the same, despite that plot starting itself and the show off with Daryl Hannah committing suicide, nothing happens as a result of it that’s in any way exciting until the end of the second episode, when we get Andrews doing all kinds of cool things. But that’s two hours in.
Until then, we get not so much a bunch of characters as a bunch of Very Important Characters who represent Very Important Things and only do and talk about Very Important Things. Must go to Pride parade with black lesbian girlfriend. Must make video explaining to the world importance of Pride parade. Must have disapproving parent who doesn’t accept my life choices. Must show importance of women’s rights in India. Must show difficulty of coming out when in the public spotlight. And so on.
In between all these Very Important Things, there is the constant repetition for each of the Sense8 of numerous scenes of them experiencing what the others are experiencing and then shaking it off as an hallucination – “What can it all mean? Am I going mad?” No, but possibly the audience is, having already seen this five times before and confidently expecting it at least another two times.
And in between this epic point underlining are interminable scenes showing off the various cultures and locations. For example, Indian bride-to-be’s fiancé puts on a faux Bollywood dance number for her at their party. It’s a lovely idea, but it only really needed 10 seconds of time to make the point. But the Wachowskis instead choose to give us the entire dance number.
The result of all of this, coupled with some of the worst dialogue since someone put The Starlost through Google Translate and back again, is that the first episode is among the worst things I’ve ever seen on TV. It makes Artemis 81 look vibrant, exciting and unpretentious.
There is just enough of an uptick at the end of episode two that I might try episode three. But I can’t imagine there’s a single human being who made it through to the end of episode one who was cheerfully looking forward to the next episode, unless they were hoping to see more of Doctor Who’s Freema Agyeman doing naughty things with her girlfriend while faking an American accent for no good reason.
I guess if there’s a lesson here, it’s that if you’re going to give creative freedom to creators, either be very careful to whom you give that freedom or be prepared for some epic failures as well as successes. Sense8 is a very ambitious, beautiful plea for empathy and tolerance and to learn to love and accept people for all their diversity. It’s also an example of how even the best creatives can need a dispassionate eye to look over their work and reign them in.
Even if you are an REM hater, ‘The End of the World As We Know It’ has never been more boring than in Between. A co-production between Netflix and Canada’s CityTV, it sees virtually everyone in the absurdly titled town of Pretty Lake aged over 21 keel over and die of a mysterious, unknown ailment. With thousands dead in just a few days, the government quarantines Pretty Lake, sticking an electric fence round it, leaving behind a town full of kids running riot while surrounded by the slowly putrifying corpse of every adult relative and mentor they’ve ever known.
The latter point should be a dramatic focus of the show, you’d have thought, with traumatised teenagers and infants blubbing and suffering from shock at their terrifying orphaning. But although episode two managed to give us kids dragging the dead bodies of their parents et al into a communal pit filled with thousands of bodies, followed by a group cremation, generally they’ve not been that upset. A bit miffed and puzzled as to what’s happening; a bit keen to send lots of texts, mope around with their boyfriends and girlfriends, and settle old scores with a bit of glowering. But they were actually all a lot more saddened by their loss of mobile phone coverage in episode three.
As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the show almost goes out of its way not to be too interesting or Lord of the Flies. None of the characters have anything going for them, having the self-centred entitlement of the typical teenager combined with the collective charisma of Ryvitas and a complete inability to care about the horrific deaths of their own parents right in front of their own eyes – not a Bruce Wayne among this lot, it seems. The show pushes the envelope of plausibility to open up possibly exciting plot scenarios, by giving the small town of Pretty Lake not only its own prison full of murderers but a zoo from which a tiger has escaped. But it’s a sign of the pausity of the show’s storytelling capabilities that this has so far failed to produce even the slightest thrill. There’s an escaped tiger everyone… an escapedtiger. No? Don’t really care. Okay.
Between‘s biggest lure is its mysterious ailment, neither bacterium nor virus, affecting only those over 21 and striking without symptoms or leaving a trace. Yet the show leaves that lying around in the background, barely touching upon it, in the exact same way Revolution chose to ignore its electricity-destroying nanites until it was too late for anyone to give a toss about them.
So after three episodes of enduring mind-numbing tedium, combined with a laughable ability to paint even a slightly plausible picture of either small town or post-apocalyptic life, I’m thinking it’s time to give up on this. But, you know, whatevs.
Barrometer rating: 5 TMINE prediction: If Netflix renews this for a second season, I’ll eat my hat
