The Suppliant Women - Royal Exchange Manchester

Saw it last October -

A play thats 2000 years old and which has been essentially rewritten to be a fable of modern society with a lot of talk of refugees, asylum seekers and people who are treated differently as they look foreign.

Three professional actors and around 50 volunteers from the local community playing the chorus of suppliant women, whether you like it will probably depend on your feelings towards ancient texts that are staged to cast comment on today. In Edinburgh each show was also opened by local dignitary (MSPs and the like).

I don't see a thread for this production now that it is at the Young Vic - but please move my posting if there is a better place for it.

Saw this tonight and it well deserves the 4 and 5 star reviews it has been receiving.

If you are interested in Greek Theatre then the choral work in this is not to be missed. It opens with a libation to Dionysus which someone outside the cast is selected to read/offer (tonight it was Christiane Amanpour, the international journalist for CNN.) Then an extraordinary group of about 25 women, (and two male actors and some additional figures) perform the piece with excellent diction and huge conviction. Bits are sung/chanted, there is a variety of interesting movements/formations, expressing the sorrow/anger/joy/fear/determination of the events that confront them. Its themes are relevant (refugees/asylum/rape/women's empowerment.) It is an hour and a half played straight through.

Agree with Foxa. While it's classic Greek chorus, which conjures up the feeling of attending some kind of new wave hippie religious ceremony, might put off seekers of conventional entertainment or drama, this is just the most topical, moving, heartfelt, involving, mesmerisingly beautiful sounding, community-grounded, passionate, compassionate, feminist show! Fantastic!

Some spoilers follow. . .

If there's one thing we've learned from the news lately, it's the power of a polyphonic chorus, that echoes from voice to voice, and magnifies in it's thrust until it's message is utterly overwhelming. One accusatory voice Harvey Weinstein could have squashed, but two, three, four echoing voices, working in chorus and concert, not only overwhelmed him, but has changed the world for women (and other victims) overnight.

It is this polyphonic superpower that the 27 young women of Southwark and Lambeth, reflecting the beautiful diversity of our capital city even as they form one perfect whole, wield, as part of the most sonorous, passionate and on-point Greek choruses I've ever seen. Alone, any one of these women would seem helplessly young and vulnerable, but together they are like a tidal wave of song and endless movement.

Everything else about the show pales in comparison. The male performers, as soldiers, citizens, Egyptians, even Oscar Batterham's smooth effective besuited King, all vanish in significance compared to this magnificent unstoppable chorus.

Even Aeschylus' brilliance succumbs to the combined force of this Chorus, as his story points, which cast them as "suppliant" and which present Omar Ibrahim's Danaos as a kind of guide and guru for the women, seem laughable in this current moment.

Suppliant is the past, these women demand their due. This is the future.

While I would happily praise every member of the chorus, I, perhaps fittingly, don't know their names. It's the combine that counts. As their figurehead, and chorus leader, Gemma May is flat out fantastic, commanding in verse, in movement, and in song. Yet even she alone, paled in her individual impact, compared to the force of the whole.

Sometimes, a show meets a moment, even if it was created before that moment. Today's moment finds perfect expression in this show!

This cast needs a longer run!

5 stars.

I didn’t see him in
The auditorium

at the preview I attended

It's like the Old Vic and Young Vic are having a Vic-off as to which theatre can respond the worst to harrasment allegations...

The YV

Don’t strike me as the cleverest of theatres

Hardly eloquent

For all the good shows they put on

Which is the main focus

Nevertheless

They are quite cack handed in many other ways

Even amateur some might say