This is an odd one.
Written and directed by James Hartley, it’s a whodunnit comedy featuring the ancient Greek gods.
Someone has murdered Hephaestus, the god of artisans. All the other gods of the pantheon, excepting Hermes the messenger, are suspects. Athena, the god of wisdom, must identify the killer before more immortal lives are lost. (Don’t worry, that seeming inconsistency is cleverly overcome.)
The Agatha Christie style set-up means no-one can leave until the crime is solved. So the suspects mope around and bicker amongst each other (which is sort of what we moderns think the Greek gods did – that’s if we think of them at all.)
It’s the rather bizarre dramatis personae that’s one of the main reasons I call this piece an oddity. After all, the Greek gods are hardly household names in Australia, and no-one, anywhere, has taken them seriously as objects of devotion for millennia. However, the script ensures even a classical novice can navigate this foreign world.
Natasha Cheng is absolutely outstanding as Athena. Her presence and poise are divine. Brenton Aimes as Hermes delivers one-liners with perfect comic timing. Cam Ralph uses his beautiful bass voice to superb effect in creating an amusingly self-important Poseidon. Daniel Moxham as Dionysius induces giggles with a portrait of a deity who has simply partied too hard, a god who offers not life-affirming ego-destroying joy, but rather falls into pathetic little tricks to hide a substance-abuse problem.
The humour of the piece would gain from an increased pace and further development of the physical comedy. (Since you can’t present the truth of fictional characters, you may as well have theatrical fun with their hyperbolic nature.)
Ironically, English speaking theatre was given an energising boost when early puritanism curbed the representation of divine characters on stage. Responding to Christian morality plays, featuring God the Father and Jesus, the fifteenth century Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge has a deity assert “Do not play with me. Go play with your peers.” And so the generations that followed, geniuses of the likes of Marlowe and Shakespeare, portrayed instead the human experience, in all its messy glory.
But though Hartley gives us gods, he provokingly leaves us pondering our relationship with them. Not the irrelevant ones of Olympus, but rather all those authority figures, all those grand narratives, that we project into the firmament – in the unspoken hope that this will somehow secure them from earthly Life’s frightening untidiness.
Paul Gilchrist
Death in the Pantheon by James Hartley
at Flight Path Theatre until June 22
Image by Tobias Moore
Theatre Red 