I knew upon entering a warehouse in North Melbourne to discuss Greek tragedy with two of Melbourne’s leading independent theatre makers that a deep and profound conversation about “unanswerable truths” and “what it is to be human” was inevitable.
At the inaugural Melbourne Theatre Company NEON Festival of Independent Theatre, the Hayloft Project’s (Benedict Hardie and Anne-Louise Sarks) new production By Their Own Hands re-examines the Oedipus myth from the perspectives of the peripheral characters, namely Jocasta, the infamous mother and the blameless messenger whose one action, to not kill an innocent child, causes one of the greatest tragedies of all time to unfold.
This is not uncharted territory for Hayloft. Since wowing independent theatre audiences with Thyestes, this company has had a reputation for serious subversion as well as cool-factor, appealing to young, skinny-legged-jean-wearing, bearded hippies as well as old, tweed jacket, bearded academics (beards are not a requirement to attend theatre in Melbourne). It is not surprising then that even with the stress and exhaustion of rehearsals, both Hardie and Sarks still had the passion to explain how they adapt classical tragedy and persistence to explore the ever-present nature of tragedy, both on and off the stage.
Sarks describes Greek myth as “very rich material” that they constantly seem to revisit, and yet the classical adaptations of Hayloft have the “basic principal” of demolishing the pre-conceived notions of both Greek (white robes, dead language) and myth (make-believe, fairy tale) in order to create work which is about “real people” and connects “to now”.
Hardie compares the process of adapting Oedipus to cracking “a concrete block in your brain” and revealing “all the prisms inside it”. It is the “confusion” and “delicate, surprising episodes” in the block itself that bring it back to life and “it’s not just a reducible idea of a mother fucker”.
Thanks to both Freud and Woody Allen, the Oedipal Complex is still a prominent cliché in western popular culture; however Hayloft are attempting to move away from this “male central narrative”. Their process seems reminiscent of the classical Phoenix myth; through contemporary dialogue and narration, the ashes of ancient texts will hopefully be re-born into a new, yet familiar story.
At the same time, tragedy’s timelessness and universality is anything but new, and unfortunately tragedy persists everywhere in modern day reality, whether on a stage, in a book or even on the news.
“We talked about the Boston bombings and there’s this great need to understand why and it’s like if we can understand why and we can figure out who is at fault then we can stop that thing from ever happening again and I think they’re really big, difficult things in our world that we won’t always have answers to,” Sarks carefully explains.
Hardie similarly describes tragedy as “maddening” and wonders “why would people keep doing it thousands of years later?” However, he states that this “complexity is a virtue” and “rather than walking away from a tragedy and going ‘I understand humanity’, it’s more like saying I understand more that I don’t understand… people are infinitely complex and engaging with that is what makes you a richer human being.”
It is this need to examine and comprehend the human condition that continues to take audiences back to a Hayloft production. See you all there.
By Their Own Hands
Hayloft Project
Written and Directed by Benedict Hardie and Anne-Louise Sarks
Southbank Theatre, The Lawler
13 June – 23 June
Tickets $25
Booking details Southbank Theatre Box Office 03 8688 0800 or mtc.com.au/neon
