AIAS

Ajax is one of the Greek heroes who fights in the Trojan war, along with the Atreides, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Achilles, Odysseus, and the lot. Myth wants it so that Ajax kills himself after suffering a great dishonour: he loses the chance (by being voted against) to be gifted with Achilles armour, when the latter dies. Although he was the to one to carry the ex-heroes body on his shoulders back to the Greek army camp, it is decided that Odysseus is the greater hero who should get the armour.

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Ajax is furious and swears revenge against the whole Achaian army. But before he can let his wrath loose, Athena prevents the massacre by temporarily "blinding" him, (i.e. making him mad.) Instead of letting his murderous act befall the real Greek army, he massively slaughters all the cattle - thinking they are namely all the Danaan generals and heroes of war. At the break of dawn his sight and reason are returned and, covered in sheep's blood, he realises what he has done. He runs in absolute shame, and sees the only solution to his anguish (not considering neither child nor wife) is to take the last thing he still has control over, his own life. Suicide - by empaling himself on his sword.

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Even though it is among the authors' less known classic tragedies, I have always been intrigued by this particular hero and his story, and his own - in my belief still very relevant today - struggles in a sclerosed patriarchal society that only values honour and glory in war. Resulting in the horrors of war and PTSD, anxiety, despair, madness, depression, feeling inapt, injustice, powerlessness, losing control over one's own body, the incapacity to cope with frustration, pain and absolute loneliness. 

 

I wanted to adapt the tragedy by Sophocles, so I began the work conventionally by theoretically (of course) setting it at the Volksbühne's big stage. I got impatient with the whole conventional theatrical process, so I started experimenting and playing with the crossing-over of levels of fiction, story-telling and narratives, e.g. what is real, in the theatre as in life, and what we are telling ourselves is real. This approach made it more exciting but also made more sense to me.

 

Between the presentation of my concept and something that started to be a sort of a performance of it, paralleling what I was explaining of the concept, by engaging the audience's fantasy to imagine that everything I was telling them was also real and actually taking place as I was talking, and "having" the action of the play re-enacted around us as we were, there, within the stage design classrooms and ateliers of the UdK.

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I created for it the model of the Volksbühne's main stage, the model of the UdK's stage design ateliers and rooms, the very which we were in, all the people present (real and fantastical alike) within the room, including myself making the presentation, the model of my presentation within the model of my presentation.

 

And so on. I tried to create that bridge between reality and the fictions (and the meta-fictions) we tell ourselves, the things we know and the things that we think we know... It was quite a trip.