Don't F*ck With Artemis: Aluin's revenge comedy offers solace in times of despair

In terms of religion, we are badly off with a single supreme and omniscient god who is also Love. Theologians and philosophers have therefore been earning a fat living for a couple of decades explaining all the misery in the world, where God is only love.

No. Then the classical Greeks. With them, free will ruled. Not so much among the people, but unfortunately mainly on Olympus, a cloud-shrouded mountain on which a rather incestuous bunch of unruly people took each other's lives as a kind of omnipotent family of gods. With ordinary mortals as playthings. Calling it a soap opera does not do justice to the drama with which the Greeks managed to make their history full of murder, manslaughter, sexually transgressive behaviour and brutal genocide manageable.

Murder comedy

Don't Fuck With Artemis is a play by Utrecht-based theatre group Aluin, in which a single chapter from that millennia-spanning tragedy has been turned into theatre comedy. Now that is quite tricky, because how do you make a comedy out of a drama in which a son kills his mother and her lover, in revenge for the murder that mother committed on his father and his sex slave that he had taken as booty after ten years of war in a faraway land, for which he also had to sacrifice his own daughter?

So that's the problem with the Greeks: that antecedents. It's quite complicated, and that's again because every revenge has to have a reason. That's how you keep the chain going. In the end, then, nobody is culpable, because compelled by history, and at the same time, therefore, eminently knowledgeable about patriotic history. In our part of the world, (honour) revenge has been banished from everyday life. Although. Seen a wonderful sketch recently, while on a walking holiday through the Mediterranean Sea registered by a few Flemings who encountered a decades-long cycle of murder and mayhem in Corsica.

Street thug

This was all introduction for a reflection on the performance of Alum itself, which offers a pleasant mix of tragedy and farce. Farce and blood vengeance go together awkwardly. It makes the performance very dependent on the players' commitment. Dennis Coenen, one of the Alum members of the first hour, plays the hapless Orestes, namesake of the great tragedy series 'Oresteia', as a slacker street urchin who would rather sit behind his Nintendo than do his duty as a mother killer. This works infectiously.

Susannah Elmecky is the flamboyant adolescent Ifigeneia, Orestes' sister, who, via a side-path in the historiography, turns out not to have been sacrificed by her father. Her joyous return to Orestes' tormented home sets all the misery in motion. This ultimately costs mother Victorine Plante and step-dad Klaas Postmus quite touchingly their lives.

You might wonder why, in these confusing and pandemic times, Alum is now coming out with a comedy about classical Greeks. I could place it, after a moment's thought, precisely because we are still a chain of stories. That applies to coronaprotestants in Rotterdam just as much as a Russian president with an ego problem in Ukraine.

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Find out more about play dates and tour: alum.co.uk