The Simplicity Of The Escape Con Comes From The Greeks In Iphigenia In Tauris!

The Good: Decent plot, One or two good lines
The Bad: Over-explains itself, No stunning lines, Somewhat weak characterizations
The Basics: A lighter play, Iphigenia In Tauris is one of Euripides’s plays that is happier, but troublingly obvious.


Lately, it seems like I have been reading quite a few Greek tragedies in my downtime. I’ve been reading plays largely because my breaks are so short and plays allow me to leap into a story without getting so immersed that I miss coming off my break. Fortunately, after a few tragedies, I had the chance to enjoy a Greek play that was dramatic, but not tragic. And enjoy it I did! Iphigenia In Tauris by Euripides is a Greek play that is a farce of convenience without any comedy. In fact, it reads almost like a thriller and were it not for how wordy it can be with explaining itself, it might be tempting to call Iphigenia In Tauris the original escape thriller.

Iphigenia In Tauris, like most Greek plays, is intended to be performed on a limited stage. As a result of having a small intended space upon which to act, Iphigenia In Tauris has limited stage directions and as a result, characters talk quite a bit about what they are doing or pretty big events that are happening off-stage. The result is a play that reads like someone telling the story of an escape plan, as opposed to watching people actually make a great escape. As well, readers today will find that Iphigenia In Tauris includes so many allusions to Greek stories that were distant subplots in the story of the Trojan War. Those two elements may make Iphigenia In Tauris a little less accessible to non-scholars of classic literature as opposed to those of us who love the classics.

Decades after being sold into slavery at the Temple of Artemis in Tauris, Iphigenia is a high priestess used by the Taurians to prepare their sacrifices (human sacrifices) for consecration within the temple. Iphigenia, along with the Chorus of Greek captives taken during the Trojan War for the same purpose, has never forgotten that she is a captive and she mourns her loss of freedom, even though she is really good at making sacrifices to Artemis. Whenever sailors land on Taurian shores, the soldiers capture them and bring them to Iphigenia for consecration and sacrifice. The Taurian King Thoas is thrilled when a pair of Greeks crash on the shores of Tauris and are captured by his soldiers.

The captives, who are brought to Iphigenia, are Orestes and his cousin, Phylades. Orestes is Iphigenia’s younger brother, though neither recognizes the other because of how young they were when Iphigenia was captured. Iphigenia makes a bargain with her captives: she will let one escape if they will take a message back to her brother, letting him know she is alive in order to get rescued by him. Orestes and Phylades fill Iphigenia in on her family’s fate after her capture and when she finally tells the pair the name of her brother, the Greeks conspire to steal a statue of Artemis from the temple and all get back to Orestes’s ship alive!

Euripides writes well and the story of Iphigenia is filled in well-enough so that readers can catch all of the specific allusions to Greek politicians and classic figures. While characters like Achilles who are mentioned (who are pretty famous to a layman), the extensive backstory of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, and Agamemnon’s wife are much more obscure. Their stories are told much the same way that “action scenes,” like Orestes describing how he intends to rob the temple of Artemis , are described.

Unfortunately, while Iphigenia In Tauris is good, the level of explanation is so extensive and dense that readers keep waiting for the inevitable. If Iphigenia In Tauris was to be a tragedy, the title character would only find out about her relation to Orestes after his death, but given how Euripides writes the scene leading up to the revelation of his identity, Orestes and Phylades toy with Iphigenia. The result is that the reader knows what is coming, in terms of the characters foreshadowing and setting up the reveal long before they make it explicit.

Iphigenia In Tauris is a decent play, even if it is a bit over-written. It’s refreshing to read something Greek that is not a tragedy, but it does make one wonder if Greek theatergoers needed both the authenticity of explanations of stories and lineage as well as somewhat dense descriptions that stave off the inevitable revelations of the truth that seem self-evident from such descriptions. Iphigenia In Tauris is entertaining, though it lacks a real “wow factor.”

For other plays, please check out my reviews of:
Hippolytus – Euripides
Arms And The Man – George Bernard Shaw
An Enemy Of The People – Arthur Miller

5.5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Hippolytus Is A Background Character In His Own Tragic Play By Euripides.

The Good: Some decent lines, Ethics, Tragic story
The Bad: Incredibly simple, Very monolithic characters, Ridiculously simple plot
The Basics: The Euripides play Hippolytus has a very basic story with a clear Greek moral that might be better if it had action motivated by characters, as opposed to nebulous, manipulative, gods.


Lately, I’ve been on a classic play kick. I’ve been reading Euripides and the latest play by the ancient Greek playwright I have read is Hippolytus. Hippolytus is one of those plays that would never be made into an American movie for two key reasons: first, the plot is pretty creepy and deals with incestual lust and second, the major actions are not motivated by the primary characters. There is something very uncompelling about watching a work where the characters are simply tools as opposed to motivating the plot. Yet, in Hippolytus, the characters are basically playthings of the gods without actually having independent strength of their own.

Moreover, as a very simplistic play, Hippolytus does not rely upon a dramatic sense of movement or action. Instead, Hippolytus has all of its important action occur off-stage and Euripides tells as opposed to show in his writing. The Chorus in Hippolytus is relied upon heavily to sell the events of the plot, which makes for a pretty disappointing play (to read and use one’s imagination to imagine watching).

At the royal palace at Trozen, Queen Phaedra is troubled. Her stepson, Hippolytus, is a devote of Artemis. Artemis, among other things, is a Goddess of Virginity and Hippolytus is celibate. As a result, Hippolytus has offended Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexual love. Aphrodite curses Phaedra with a lust for Hippolytus. Phaedra realizes her feelings are wrong and refuses to act upon her sexual attraction to her stepson, but she confesses her feelings to her nurse. Her nurse, in turn, tells Hippolytus how Phaedra feels and advises the boy to consider relieving her pressure. Pissed off and offended, Hippolytus confronts his stepmother, but does not tell anyone of her feelings because he made an oath to the nurse not to tell anyone before she revealed Phaedra’s secret.

Embarrassed beyond belief and still cursed with the lust, Phaedra kills herself. King Theseus returns home to discover his wife dead and is distraught. When he finds Phaedra’s suicide note on her, he is angered at Hippolytus. In her suicide note, Phaedra claims that Hippolytus raped her and she killed herself to avoid the shame. Theseus banishes Hippolytus, who does not tell of Phaedra’s lustful feelings because of the promise he made. Leaving the kingdom, Hippolytus’s boat get beaten upon the rocks and he is nearly killed before the truth comes out.

Hippolytus is an exceptionally basic tragedy. It has a clear moral: don’t fuck your kids. Or, alternatively, don’t lie/some promises are not worth keeping or have sex of you’ll offend the gods. Anyway, the moral story leads to tragedy for all involved and it would be so much more compelling if one cared at all about the characters. As it is, the characters are just manipulated because Aphrodite is a pissy goddess who punishes one guy who just won’t give it away.

The problem is, Aphrodite is not characterized as interesting. She is just shallow and vengeful against a man who retains his virginity. Given how many people there were in Greece, punishing one man for not giving it up seems more ridiculous than divine and powerful. There’s not even a powerful relationship between Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus. The result is a somewhat random grudge match with humans as tools of the gods. That part is not exactly a message that resonates today.

For other plays, please check out my reviews of:
Alcestis – Euripides
Arms And The Man – George Bernard Shaw
An Enemy Of The People – Arthur Miller

4.5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Criticizing Euripides: Alcestis Is Basic, Not Literature.

The Good: Decent human emotion
The Bad: Plot fails to develop, Characters do not motivate the play’s events, Simplistic
The Basics: Little more than a character thumbnail sketch, Alcestis is a disappointing play that does not truly develop as much as it concludes.


One of the nice things about working in a terrible corporate environment is that I am given more time to read. Being forced to take breaks and having nothing in common with my coworkers has inspired me to go through more of my personal library and that has been an upside of a bad situation. Unfortunately, not all of my reading material is truly as memorable as one might hope. Alcestis, the classic Greek play by Euripides (as translated into English by Philip Vellacott) certainly falls into that category.

Alcestis is a very basic play that never truly develops beyond its original concept. It suffers because there is no genuine character development in it and, as such, it reads like a repetitive plot summary of the important events that precede the play itself. The play is hard to get excited about because it is, largely, one man whining quite a bit and then someone else doing the “heavy lifting” for him. In fact, the protagonist of Alcestis, the Greek king Admetus, is all about letting other people take important actions on his behalf and that makes for an uninspired lead character. Equally as important is the fact that Alcestis undermines its own themes about the nature of sacrifice.

Beginning with Apollo making a deal with Death in which he acknowledges that King Admetus was set to die, but that Queen Alcestis has opted to take his place, the machinations of the gods are affected by Alcestis’s strong sense of character. At the palace, Alcestis calls Admetus to her and declares that if she is taking his place with Death, that he should never remarry and not force their children to accept a stepmother. Alcestis then appears to die and her funeral procession leaves the palace. Shortly thereafter, Admetus begins to mourn and the palace takes in visitors.

Hercules, a friend of Admetus, drops by and despite the palace not being ready to receive him, Admetus insists that Hercules enjoy the hospitality of the king. While Admetus mourns – having lied and told Hercules that the palace is in mourning for the death of a recent visitor and friend of the family – Hercules gets drunk and makes a fool of himself. Admetus’s mother and father visit the palace to try to join in the mourning for Alcestis, but Admetus pushes them away, angered that neither of them offered to sacrifice themselves for Alcestis when he was dying. Admetus’s father, Pheres, is especially angered by Admetus’s insistence that he should have sacrificed himself so Alcestis did not have to step up. But when a servant tells Hercules the truth, Hercules is disappointed that Admetus lied to him and he resolves to wrestle Alcestis from the very grasp of Death itself.

Alcestis is a very basic philosophical play, but part of the problem with it is that it explores ideas, but takes no stances. So, for example, Alcestis’s sacrifice is seen as universally noble, but Admetus’s anger toward his father is met with a rational argument; Alcestis made her sacrifice with her free will and Pheres was under no obligation (as a free man himself) to sacrifice himself for his son. Pheres argues that he loves life as much as Admetus and that it would have been more honorable for Admetus to die as he had been fated to than let Alcestis take his place in death and then whine about her sacrifice. Pheres makes a good point, though Alcestis makes a reasonable point that as a man close to death anyway, Pheres could have made a sacrifice that illustrated real love for his son and daughter-in-law (especially given that he has nothing to live for).

Either way, the points become moot when the random element of Hercules is added to the mix. Alcestis, who has only the briefest on-stage role in the play that bears her name, has easily the most character in the play. She acts out of love and makes a decision with only the most minor string attached. Nevertheless, she makes her decision out of love and she does not articulate any regret for her decision.

But, Admetus whines his way through Alcestis and Hercules steps up to do the heroic thing. That makes Admetus seem weaker than Hercules (which he is!) and less resolved than his wife. Instead, he gets a second chance at life and whines his way into possibly getting that opportunity at no cost. That makes for a morally ambiguous play that seems to have the message that if one whines to the right people, they can get anything they want.

The play does not end up taking any strong stance on what is right or wrong in the circumstance and the moral ambiguity makes Alcestis seem more pointless than a treatise on free will. The reason for this (because I am not one who likes to be force fed the themes to my literature) is that no side in Alcestis argues with enough of a compelling or well-rounded view. Instead, each side argues its own monolithic point until Hercules just goes out and makes most of the arguments null and void. In other words, Alcestis fails to even commit to making a philosophical discussion. Even though it is short, Alcestis reads more like a waste of time than a compelling journey through ideas or characters.

For other plays, please check out my reviews of:
Arms And The Man – George Bernard Shaw
An Enemy Of The People – Arthur Miller
Long Day’s Journey Into Night – Eugene O’Neill

3.5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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