Spaghetti 'Thyestes': classic roots work fiercely in a new preparation

In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays in which bloodshed was elevated to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.

Simon Stone is an Australian wonderboy, at least in theatre. He mixes the casual acting style and brash modernisation drive of the Western European stage with the realistic, serious acting style of his Australian actors. This makes for an absolutely appealing cocktail.

Last year Simon Stone performed an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. The austerely played family drama, locked in a glass cage, came close to the audience. The play went on to become a hit at the Holland Festival.

This year, he performs Thyestes. The classic play, by Seneca that is, is about the fratricidal quarrel that underlies just about all Greek suffering from early primeval times to the present day. Without the first atrocity, as depicted here, no Iliad and Odyssey, no Oidipus, no Oresteia. So that atrocity had to be bad, and it is. Brother Atreus, after a life of conflict and adultery, presents brother Thyestes with a reconciling feast, with his two children as the main ingredient. Whereby the joke is that Thyestes only learns this at dessert.

Simon Stone translated the drama to now and asked his three excellent actors how they could make such a drama imaginable now. The result is a raw-realist three-person jam session. No Greek patriarchs here, but three young lads on tour, self-proclaimed demigods with no purpose except sex, wealth and power.

The piece still until 27 June to be seen at Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam.

For those who want to try it at home, here is the recipe.

Ingredients (2 persons)

250 grams of dried spaghetti

5 kg classic carrots (shrink considerably during cooking)

3 bottles of Australian red wine.

1 kilo of bullets

1 rubber strap-on cock

1 dash of Greek olive oil

2 tender children

Plenty of water to boil in

1 Simon Stone.

Start the preparation with a light touch. It is important that your dinner guest is as unprepared as possible. Make your guests curious about the main course by showing that its consequences are terrible: murder, madness, war. So shuffle your times a bit. Play a few scenes from the future before the main dish.

Serve the spaghetti, and let it taste good. The rest, as they say, is history.

Feast, in other words.