Your Fringe programme blurb describes The Rest is Action as a “reinvention” of The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies. Was the trilogy the original starting point?
Nyree: I think it really started with Politik [a 2012 piece by The Company].
Jose: Yeah, Politik was about what participatory structures [in the current political system] we can have access to. And, as we were reflecting on things after Politik, The Oresteia came up and seemed relevant for us because it was a sort of system itself. Tragedy is a system, with very clear rules about how to participate in it.
And we were also interested in the text because it’s foundational, to two things. First, to theatre, in terms of marking a change in the way theatre is consumed by a society. The way we understand theatre now, the way we interact with it, finds its source in what these guys, the Greeks, were doing at that time. And second, it’s foundational to democracy. It’s a rehearsal of the idea of democracy. It’s the transition from the divine, a mythical system, to a rational system [of justice].
So are the classical features of tragic drama, like the chorus and singing and masks, present in The Rest is Action?
N: No, none of what is traditionally connected to tragedy in that sense, but the idea of tragic causality is key to the show: how you become a tragic hero or subject.
J: So, another reason we picked up the text is related to how we, as human groups, choose, at different points in history, a story, a grand narrative if you like, that we can be part of. So our actions gain sense, or gain meaning, they have a support system that can say whether they are right or wrong…
There’s context.
J: Yes, it gives context to our actions. For that you need a narrative. Aristotle had the idea that plot is the basic structure of our experience, without plot we have no experience, because experience is based on something you can organise based on what you have lived. What I have lived is a plot…
You have to be able to relate current experience to previous experience…
J: Exactly, yeah. The idea that memory is a creative activity more than actually recalling facts as they happened. You recall the past in order to understand the present. So you’re plotting the past, in certain ways. Plotting, or narrative, seems to be an almost essential activity of humans, especially as social beings. So, as we looked into The Oresteia the idea came up that this structure of tragedy is something that we modern subjects still use, these days, in terms of how we victimise ourselves, or in order to be able to integrate certain figures of authority, in terms of how we respond to the state or respond to religion, and how we interpret acts as being good or bad and achieve ethical confirmation about what we do, and how we build our future… so we decided to use the idea of tragedy being one of these narratives that we can be a part of, so we can make sense of the world.
How do contemporary individuals picture themselves as tragic subjects?
Rob: It’s not quite as literal as that when you’re talking about a real person, nowadays. But it’s related to the idea that there’s no space ever for a tragic hero to say “Actually, fuck this, I don’t care what’s happened in the past, with my family or whatever, I don’t believe in any of this shit, fuck it.” There’s no possibility of escape.
J: That was the main question, for us. We thought: why not? Why can he not say “Listen, I’m not going to kill my mother”? The reason why he can’t, and this is the most fundamental thing, is that it’s because, in his conception of the world, the gods told him that this is what he has to do. So, there is no way around that.
N: Otherwise, the whole belief system of the way the world is collapses and it’s preferable to follow what the gods say and embrace your fate and kill your mother, so that you don’t come to the tragic realisation that there is no… anything.
Do you have the feeling that this tragic structure has influenced, not explicitly but in the sense of the genre of tragedy having been influential in Western culture, how people interact with the political system they find themselves in and means they cannot see a way to act from outside it?
J: Yeah, exactly that. It’s ingrained in the way we accept authority. We accept authority as we do, call it state, religion, law, ethics, because it’s in us. There is a part that is eternal and fundamental. Within the tragic storyline, you call it the gods. In our personal lives, you can talk about the psychological study of how we become subjects, how we go from being an individual to being a subject. So, we’re talking about Kant and Freud and their theory that, in the moment self-consciousness comes into play, there is a division into master and slave, authority and the one reacting to authority. In tragedy, that is exemplified in very literal ways. The reason the tragic hero can’t get out of it is because he would need to acknowledge the fact that the gods are his own creation. He would need to say: “we made this thing”, which is something that even nowadays we cannot do. We don’t have the capacity to say, “Hey, the world is shit, why don’t we just change this thing that we made ourselves, because: didn’t we make it ourselves?” Power seems to be some sort of entity that is detached from our agency. It’s a question about agency, in the end.
And, is it funny?
N: Is it funny? Or is it fun?
Is it funny.
N: It’s fun. And, yeah, I think it’s funny too.
The Rest is Action by The Company opens on September 6th to 13th (with previews on September 4th and 5th) in Project Arts Centre’s Space Upstairs. Tickets cost €15 or €13 with a concession. Tiger Dublin Fringe runs citywide from September 5th to 20th, for bookings see www.fringefest.com or call box office on 1850 FRINGE (374 643)
Words: Rachel Donnelly
Check out more of our Tiger Dublin Fringe Coverage here:
Kris Nelson, Artistic Director
Philip Connaughton on Tardigrade
Raymond Keane on Beckett’s Fizzles
Miguel Gutierrez on DEEP Aerobics
