Conversation with Edna O'Brien

Iphigenia - costume drawing by Hayden Griffin

Q. What attracted you to Iphigenia in Aulis?
A. I have always been drawn to Greek drama. These stories, refashioned from earlier myths seize on one's imagination because they depict passions and compulsions that everyone can identify with.

Iphigenia is the least often performed of Euripides' plays, the little nursling that is the progenitor of Greek slaughter and dramas that followed. It is also eerily relevant to our time - the choice between war or no war, between truth and ambition. The drama is all the more human and knife - edged by having at its core a family dilemma. King Agamemnon has to choose between love of his daughter or the fate of his country. Who will try to persuade him either way - a witch, a prophet, his wife Clytemnestra, his brother Menelaus, or Iphigenia herself, the unwitting and appalled victim for sacrifice?

In Euripides' original, the girl isn't sacrificed at all. I do not think that anyone of his unflinching truth would have softened his story for public consumption, but down the centuries people did, and in each and every version it ends with Iphigenia being exchanged for a deer. That seems to me pusillanimous.

Menelaus - costume drawing by Hayden Griffin

Q. What changes have you made in your version of Iphigenia?
A. I have kept chorus voices to a minimum because it seemed to me that the drama itself is so very riveting and not in need of explanatory voices, beautiful though they are in the original. Among the other liberties I took, was to introduce a Witch who personifies the random evil and amorality of our times.

The Sixth Girl? In Euripides' play, some girls swim over the straits to see the men of the fleet and then disappear. They are really just light relief and have no part in the development of the play. By my thinking, the Sixth Girl, who comes late, is knowledgeable and bewitching and her influence on Agamemnon so humanising that he resolves to avert the slaughter.

I wanted the characters to be credible. When Greek drama was written and was performed in outdoor theatres, the language as well as the sensibility of the characters was probably stiffer and more heroic. I hope to have re-imagined characters in the pitch of drama whom we can identify with.

In conversation with Sophie Hunter, Education Projects Officer, Sheffield Theatres