'Ah! Why am I raving, panting, gasping?' A vomitile rip-off of Euripides' 'Orestes'. Witness clashing tongues, testosterone and Gillette.com as Electra, Helen of Troy and Joan Collins battle destiny using the almighty power of the Nike tick.
Washing Line Productions' hilarious and disturbing new work takes Euripides' 'Orestes', the story of the disintegration of a noble Greek household, and reworks it as an episode of Dynasty. The play is riddled with lipstick stains, murder, and Joan Collins shoulder pads. Euripides' triumphant massacre of morals, blood ties and civilized behaviour becomes a parable for our times: a wild dance of racing hearts, tongues and egos.
Athens, cradle of the western world, bleeds across the broadsheets. The economic (c)Rash spreads and shakes the polis, and the people of Argos are itching, scratching to stone Orestes and Electra. The exiled Helen of Troy squats in the Holiday Inn Argos, the citizens run wild in the streets, and sequins and blood run in the gutters.
Branded a five star company by the British Theatre Guide, Washing Line Productions celebrate a total theatre, deploying all corners of performance (live art, dance, physical theatre and an electronic soundscape) to create a unique visual reality. Attuned to today’s schizophrenic ipod shuffle tempo-rhythm; we create an immersive cabaret style of performance pulsing with orange faces and pink noise, liberating audience and performer alike, to rave, stomp it, Nike tick “Just do it”.
Waiting for Apollo examines the 2010 body as a cultural battlefield, wrestling with Greek myths, carrot tanning and fashion fetishism. The performance uses the codes and products of mass culture to disassemble and stripteaseingly poke at the masks and categories of identity, social hierarchy and gender. Within the hurly-burly of Greek myth, Joan Collins, commuter crowds and polyester fabrics, we seek the authentic voice, the real, sweaty poetic body – moments of clarity and stillness within Euripedes’ almighty text.
