Graham Mclaren has never doubted his choice of an all-classical repertoire for his theater company. "Show me a playwright who's ever written something as great as Oedipus [Rex]," he challenged. As the artistic director of the Scottish classical theater group Theatre Babel, Mclaren's confidence is well-grounded as the group's reputation has grown in recent years, particularly after 2001's hit Medea.
For the second week of the CKS Cultural Center's British Theater festival, Theatre Babel is bringing to Taipei Thebans, which was also a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival earlier this year.
Thebans links up three myths -- Oedipus, Jokasta and Antigone, originally written by Sophocles and Euripides -- into one ambitious story "of the curse on the house of Laius, and follows through on all the stories" that make "a rollercoaster of plagues, war, love and death," as Liz Lochhead, its playwrite, described it at the play's opening last week.
It's Theatre Babel's second adaptation of Greek tragedies, which director Mclaren said he wanted to work on because "they are classics."
"A man or a woman tries to be greater than he or she is and challenge the gods yet inevitably fails, that's a tragedy. Euripides says just about everything there is to say about human nature, about how we live spiritually, mentally, emotionally and sexually in 75 minutes. No modern playwright could do that."
In putting the classic on stage, Mclaren worked with Lochhead, who has been hailed as "Scotland's greatest living dramatist" by Scotland on Sunday. Trained in art and having published several collections of poetry, Lochhead ventured into plays in 1982. Among her successful plays are 1987's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and 1999's Perfect Days. Her Medea, which Mclaren also directed, won the Saltire Book of the Year Award in 2001.
Lochhead's innovative adaptations of ancient plays are not without dissenters. During a visit to Eton after the release of Medea, she was confronted by pupils angry at her "translation" of a Greek play. Replacing Greek with modern English was Lochhead's way of making the ancient works speak to a contemporary audience, which stroke a chord with Theatre Babel.
"There are people who want to keep the tradition of ancient Greek plays, but that doesn't work. The society of audiences has changed. The language has to become like the way you and I would say it," Mclaren said.
The theme of Thebans may be timeless, but Mclaren said it contained even more relevancy post-Sept. 11.
"Lochhead and I have been talking about it for years. On the evening of 9/11, we were performing Medea, a tragedy. That week we decided it's time to do the Thebans tragedies.
"The questions about how to be a human and how to be alive will come up in the audience in a tragedy like this," Mclaren said.
"As a director, all I could do was to ask people to think about how important it is to be level-headed, not to believe you're always right, like George Bush or Osama bin Laden. What I learned from the plays is that when someone says, `I will not be changed,' then something happens, and then they either have to become a tyrant or lose face, so that's what America has become. On the other side, you may also become terrorists."
If this sounds too political, Mclaren does not apologize for it.
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