Kerry

A busy weekend! I went to two shows, The Revolutionists and Galinthias.

The Revolutionists is a four-woman show set during the French Revolution. Playwright Olympe de Gouges is trying to write a play when her friend the Haitian rebel Marianne Angelie shows up asking for Olympe to write some pamphlets. Soon after, Charlotte Corday bursts in, asking Olympe to write some bitchin’ last words for her to speak on the scaffold after assassinating Marat. Last but not least, Marie Antoinette steals the show, a hilariously vapid and vain and yet pathos-filled figure.

Overall a lot of fun, although I must say I rolled my eyes whenever we veered into “this is a story about the Power of Stories (™)” territory. As a writer this theme surely ought to speak to me, and yet so often I feel that it’s asserted rather than demonstrated: the characters rattle on about the power of stories but the story if anything shows the opposite, given that three of the four heroines end up guillotined.

You might think the level of guillotining might make the play quite dark, but overall it’s funny and surprisingly upbeat. (For instance, when Olympe de Gouges dies, we get her last words and then a few different interpretations of her last words, starting with the urgent cry of “Please do my plays!”, which raised a laugh, because it arises so well out of her characterization up to that point.) Maybe a bit too upbeat? I’m not sure that “People are still telling your story centuries after you were guillotined, and isn’t that what matters?” actually is what matters. I for one would prefer not to be guillotined.

Galinthias is a recent play about a minor figure from Greek mythology: the midwife who delivered Hercules after Hera cursed his mother Alcmene with perpetual labor. In punishment for breaking the curse, Galinthias was in turn cursed to become a weasel.

However, in this retelling, Hecate has taken Galinthias under her protection, and one day a month, Galinthias gets to be human again. She uses her time as a human to act as a midwife and abortion provider, until young Xandra shows up all “I was raped by Poseidon! Can you get rid of the pregnancy?”

Galinthias is understandably reluctant to put herself in a position to be cursed by the gods yet again, but of course she ends up agreeing. They recruit Alcmene (not only Galinthias’s former queen, but also possibly her former girlfriend) and the three of them go on a quest that takes them across the Greek world. They visit Pythia, who sends them to Colchis where they meet terrifying but helpful Valley Girl Medea (“Daddy keeps killing people! It’s so boring!”), who sends them to the garden of the Hesperides where they have a slo-mo fight with a nymph who nearly strangles Galinthias with her own braid… Oh, and also Hecate has sent the Furies after them, because she’s so annoyed that her pet weasel ran away (still in human form) rather than come back as she is supposed to do.

Also lots of fun! Very funny, which is not necessarily what I expected when reading the synopsis which prominently content-warned the Themes of Sexual Violence. A solid adaptation. Perhaps reaching a bit too hard for contemporary relevance at times, but nonetheless deeply interested in Greek mythology and knowledgeable enough to explore it from new angles.