Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The walkouts start when Penthesilea and Achilles, mostly naked, begin to writhe in a very large saucer of thick slime. Critics of German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist called his 1808 play unstageable. Clearly, some consider this production unwatchable. It’s certainly unusual. But mostly Eline Arbo’s radical, blood-soaked take on Penthesilea at The Lyceum is unforgettable. Arbo, who impressed Edinburgh International Festival audiences in 2022 with The End of Eddy and whose (more restrained) production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years is currently playing in London, takes Kleist’s play and makes a kind of post-punk musical of it, leaning into its brutality and rage, while chucking in a few songs along the way as the cast frequently launch into moody electronica covers of hits by Perfume Genius, Kavinsky and Ethel Cain. Nine actors from the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where the production originated, all wear grungy outfits in shades of black. They tell the story of the Amazon queen who falls in love with Achilles during the Trojan war. The catch: Amazons can only have sex with men they’ve conquered in battle, so she has to defeat Achilles in order to enjoy him. Love is a battlefield, in other words, and the battlefield an expression of love. Blood flows freely, and Ilke Paddenburg’s Penthesilea spends much of her stage time raging and shouting, while her warriors sulk or cower around her.And, yes, it’s a piece about gender. Lurking under the slimy surface of the production are vexed questions about why and how societies teach their men and women to act in certain ways. Achilles and the Greeks are horrified at the Amazonian women’s norms; the feeling is mutual. Those black costumes suggest slippages in gender presentation, too: Achilles wears a sheer blouse, Penthesilea a kind of suit.But Arbo doesn’t go hard on that theme. She seems to care more about making the production look astonishing and feel visceral. It’s theatre as art installation. Take stock of the stage at any one moment and it’s absolutely beautiful, a masterpiece in monochrome by designer Pascal Leboucq. Rectangular frames glide down from the flies, some containing instruments which the ensemble play moodily, heads bobbing. Bars of white lights break the stage into geometric patterns. It’s hard to think of any other theatre production whose lighting comes close to Varja Klosse’s here: so varied and so sculptural.The only other colour is red. Roses, for the orgiastic festival which the Amazons celebrate after winning men in battle, and of course blood, lots of it, which Penthesilea slops in cupped handfuls over Achilles in the climactic scene where she tears him to shreds in rage.There’s humour too, an occasional recognition from the actors at how ridiculous this all is — not just the excesses of the story, but the trappings of the production: one guitarist doesn’t notice Penthesilea arriving onstage and keeps strumming away, until a bandmate yanks the lead out of his guitar.Those moments are welcome in a piece that, for all its visual beauty, is still a bit of a slog: just over two hours with no interval and, oh yes, the whole thing’s in Dutch, while we try to keep up with English surtitles in off-puttingly arch language (“the spring forces its kiss on nature’s bosom” etc).As the walkouts suggest, some won’t take to this very European production of a pretty odd play. Yet there is something compelling about it. Penthesilea’s story has been told in hundreds of ways for thousands of years — and always by men. Taken up by Arbo, there’s certainly goo and grunge, but no wonder what prevails is overwhelming rage.★★★★☆To August 6, eif.co.uk
