One afternoon in June, among the thousand-year-old stones of the Greek Theater of Syracuse, something cracks. During the rehearsals of «Iphigenia in Tauris», the writer Michel Houellebecq gets up and leaves. For Marina Valensise, that gesture of intolerance becomes the signal of a deeper fracture, the symptom of a modernity that has stopped recognizing itself in the classics. From that episode «A Greek heart blossoms. The return to the classics in the twentieth century” (Neri Pozza), the essay in which Valensise – journalist, essayist and delegate councilor of the National Institute of Ancient Drama – demonstrates how in the past, in moments of crisis, Europe found in Greek myths not a nostalgic refuge but a reserve of meaning.
«From Cocteau to Stravinsky, from Albert Camus to Corrado Alvaro, tragedy has never been just a monument to contemplate». In today’s time that confuses freedom and omnipotence, the lesson of the Greeks returns to question the present and between Syracuse and Magna Graecia the myth continues to pulsate as a question more alive than ever.
Have we stopped listening to the classics?
“Unfortunately. Yet, in the twentieth century the classics had an essential function. In the 1910s and 1920s, when language and representation were in crisis, the moderns forcefully returned to the Greeks. Let’s think about Cocteau, Picasso and Stravinsky: the classic was not conservation, it was experimentation and pure avant-garde. In the 1930s it became the place where identity, desire and power mixed together. Henry de Montherlant, aristocratic and anti-modern, stages Pasiphae to investigate the strength of female desire. It is not an ideological gesture, it is moral. And in the post-war period Camus recovers tragedy as an instrument of freedom. He states that we have forgotten the tragic dimension because in Christian civilization the only tragedy is that of Golgotha. Here there is everything, conflict and conscience, it is freedom against power.”
In the book you also talk about an explosion of the classic.
«Yes, because at a certain point the pressure of the contemporary becomes so strong that the myth is no longer able to remain in its original form. I think of Sarah Kane, the classic is almost burned from the inside. This is the warning: if we transform the classics into relics we lose them, but if we deform them to the point of emptying them, we betray them. The challenge is to return to their truth, which is a living force, and make it speak to the present without mutilating it.”
Let’s come to Corrado Alvaro. His Medea d’Aspromonte is one of the strongest passages in the book.
«Because the great Alvaro carries out a cultural operation of great finesse and courage. It removes Medea from the archetypal dimension of fury and brings her back into the story. It absolves her of infanticide as an act of lucid and deliberate revenge and transforms her into a refugee, an uprooted, foreign woman, exposed to the hostility of a community that does not recognize her and does not welcome her. In his rewriting the extreme gesture does not arise from hatred, but from desperation. The children are not instruments of punishment against Jason, but victims of a mob ready to lynch him. Medea becomes a painful mother who chooses sacrifice to save them from collective barbarism. He is a wounded figure, not monstrous; tragic, not demonic. He is a figure who asks for understanding, not condemnation.”
What makes this Medea so current?
«His Medea is the daughter of the post-war period, of the experience of exile, of persecution, of the uprooting that Europe experienced. It is no longer just the woman who breaks the patriarchal order, but the foreigner who pays the price for denied belonging. In this sense the myth is not betrayed, it is reactivated. It becomes the mirror of a century that has experienced diaspora and irreparable fractures.”
She has Calabrian family origins. How much does Magna Grecia weigh in your gaze?
«For me the myth is home. I was born in Rome but I lived every summer in Calabria, between Scilla and the Piana di Gioia Tauro. It means growing up between Demeter and Persephone: after all, when we were little we played with the votive statuettes of the cult of Ceres. It’s not nostalgia, it’s an anthropological fact, the myth is part of the stratification of the earth, it runs through my veins, it’s part of my view of the world.”
Do you find this look in your experience at Inda?
«Yes, it is a moving and complex experience. The Inda has existed for over 110 years and since 1914, except for the two war interruptions, it has staged Greek tragedies in Syracuse. But every year the texts are retranslated in the belief that they must speak to the man of the present, which is why Houellebecq’s gesture was a shock.”
Can you tell us about this magic?
«You see, staging Sophocles in a space without wings, with the sky and the sea as a natural backdrop and 4,500 spectators in the stands is an enormous artistic and organizational challenge. Every year the audience grows, especially among young people: all this is a great responsibility. Inda is one of the few cultural institutions with over 70% of its own revenues, which means that it lives on its own feet. This requires administrative rigor, but also a clear cultural vision.”
Today, why do we have to go back to the classics?
«Because never before have we needed to return to the ancient tragedy which becomes the tool we have at our disposal to counter the tyranny of ideological states, the tyranny of totalitarian states and of realized ideology. Centuries pass but the Greek tragedy is a great lesson in civilization that we cannot afford to ignore.”