Hecuba

After Hamlet watches a player get especially hot under the collar in the fiery role of Hecuba, the dallying prince asks, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage with tears and cleave the general ear with horrid speech?” Then Hamlet races on in that mode, providing a how-to for actors taking on the assignment.

Now playing the matriarch in Euripides’ Hecuba is Vanessa Redgrave, whose surname suggests the bloody finish that the Trojan queen’s children meet. And if drowning the stage with tears and cleaving the general ear with horrid speech seems de trop in 2005 — which it may not have in 423 B.C. when Euripides spewed the drama as an outcry against the lengthening Peloponnesian War — any actress accepting the role is still required to pick up the cue for passion with as much conviction as possible.

But Redgrave doesn’t, despite her well-known pacifist leanings likely predisposing her to sympathize with Hecuba. She enters by crawling under a tent flap with white hair flying away from her long face. Her son Polydorus (Matthew Douglas) — who has served as ghostly prologue to the tragedy — is dead at the hands of the conquering Greeks, and Hecuba is meant to be prostrate with grief. Any thespian asked to exhibit uncontrollable mourning at the start of a drama and then expected to accelerate his/her performance from there has a tough challenge. It’s one that Redgrave, a superlative actor in most of the parts she plays, falls short of satisfying.

She does exhibit many of the external attitudes necessary in portraying the distraught and vengeful Hecuba. Her dark eyes alternately flash and go blank; her hands claw the air. Once she’s risen from the ground, she repeatedly falls back in utter physical surrender. When told that her daughter Polyxena (Lydia Leonard) is condemned to die as retribution for Achilles’ demise, she clutches the doomed girl, all the while imploring Odysseus (Darrell D’Silva) to rescind his decree. Such exhibitions of anger and despair have their effect, but only intermittently do these emotions appear to originate deep within this Hecuba.

Perhaps fittingly, Redgrave’s best moments are those just after she has triumphed vindictively by slaughtering the children of Polymestor (D’Silva again) and, at the play’s fade-out, when she’s dealing with Polydorus’s bagged but unburied body. Finally, heartbreaking performance fills the wide BAM stage, on which set and costume designer Es Devlin has placed 49 tents in five ascending ranks. (These dusty enclosures are where the newly enslaved Trojan women have been sent to fulfill their humiliating duties.) The production also features lighting by Adam Silverman and sound design by Fergus O’Hare.

Euripides’ play has been translated rather well by Tony Harrison, although occasionally he lets relaxed contemporary speech get the better of him. Wondering why her mother has become increasingly distraught after Polydorus’ death, Polyxena says, “It must be something really bad” and then follows that with “It must mean something really bad.” She’s an unusually morbid youngster who views her end as being “sacrificed, spread-eagled, struck, my girl’s gullet slashed open, dispatched down to the world below.”

Leonard gets Polyxena’s hardening core; the spirit with which the actress goes to the terminating sword is something to see. So is the melting sympathy with which Alan Dobie as Talthybius recounts Polyxena’s gallant demise. “You’re asking me to weep a second time,” he says, looking as if he has only just dried his eyes. The others who give Euripides’ and Hecuba’s situation their due are Malcolm Tierney as an authoritative Agamemnon and D’Silva as the stricken Polymestor.

The 12-woman chorus, chanting their wounded words to music by Mick Sands, is also forceful as they alternately bemoan Hecuba’s plight and their own. Possibly, it’s their presence that most helps this production to make Euripides’ point, which is to excoriate war but which also goes beyond that to make a larger statement about men’s cruelty to women. Although Agamemnon (who’s already sacrificed his daughter to the war against the Trojans) and Talthybius display some humanity, it’s the men who rule and the women who weep in this world. Throughout Hecuba, Euripides boldly deplores the imbalance.

When Redgrave received mixed reviews for her Hecuba in London’s West End earlier this year, Harrison apparently moved in to replace director Laurence Boswell. (No director is credited in the program.) In an interview conducted by Paulanne Simmons of GO Brooklyn, Harrison reported Redgrave as having been “demoralized by a dysfunctional director” and added that “it was my duty to rescue her.” Unfortunately, just as Hecuba is unable to rescue Polyxena, Harrison hasn’t fully rescued Redgrave.