Just Telling Stories? Public Testimony in Molora and The Angry Wounds

This paper examines two recent adaptations of Greek tragedy that explore the role played by public testimony in conflict resolution: Yael Farber’s Molora and Julian Armitstead’s The Angry Wounds. In Molora (2003 premiere, Grahamstown, South Africa), South African playwright Yael Farber offers an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia set in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The play foregrounds the agonistic nature of both Greek tragedy and democratic judicial process. Indeed, it is in the communal process of bearing witness to lived experience, with all the conflicts and contradictions that such a process engenders, that Molora sees the resolution to the age-old cycle of violence. The play sets democratic parrhesia and multivalence against the torture techniques of the totalitarian regime. The ‘wet bag’ method of torture relived in Scene 7 leads not only to forced confessions but also prevents speech: “The person, deprived of breath, is unable to testify to their experiences and is denied not just the right to speak but the right to be heard,” (Molora, p. 9). At the heart of this play is the belief that ‘the common everyman and everywoman’ (Molora, p. 7) has his or her own truth to tell, and that bearing witness to this truth can heal individuals and communities in the aftermath of violence. The role that public testimony plays in the reintegration into society of those who have experienced and participated in violence is also a central theme of Julian Armitstead’s The Angry Wounds, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes recently premiered at Oxford University (November 2009). Philoctetes has been desensitized by trauma, but rediscovers the ability to feel when he and Neoptolemus share with each other intimacies of their experiences, and begins to regain his humanity through the process of telling his story. When, however, Neoptolemus tries to make public confession of war-crimes he has committed, Odysseus and Diomedes do not want to listen. Odysseus cautions to “leave the past alone,” adding that “memories can be as dangerous as wounds.” Odysseus also feels guilt, for having abandoned his comrade Philoctetes in his hour of need, and drinks to forget; his solution to the impasse with Philoctetes is to “make up and go home.” He sees Philoctetes’ obsession with the past and his desire for justice as impractical. Diomedes has seen his own son die before his eyes; he avoids asking questions, and seeks solace in doing his patriotic duty. Like Molora, The Angry Wounds contrasts the complex realities of lived experience with the tidy ‘facts’ of the dominant mythical narrative promulgated by those in power. Thus, although they respond to different contexts (the TRC in South Africa and the Iraq Inquiry in the United Kingdom respectively), both plays draw on Greek tragedy to make the case for parrhesia, and provide evidence of shifting attitudes towards classical works in the new millennium: no longer seen as exercising a hegemonic grip, they are now called upon as valuable partners in a two-way exchange of stories. In fact, it is precisely in their departure from the tragic script that these retellings derive much of their potency.