Ajax

Sophocles’ Ajax is a tragedy written in the fifth century BCE that follows Ajax’s (Seton Pollock) jealous vengeance and then great shame. 

Burning House have done a fair job in the writing and development room, modernising the text well, and setting it in the Middle East. The team assembled have comprehensive CVs behind them, and are not shorthanded. It’s confusing, then, as to how they managed to deliver a chaotic and boring show. 

Storytelling requires light to understand dark, the comical to lend gravity to tragedy, and speed for slowness. There is no rhythm in this production, nor recognition of the need for dynamism.

The show begins with a loud soundbite of sirens and a helicopter’s rotors speeding up. Ajax is screaming. There’s blood everywhere. Sit back for 20 minutes because there is no light or shade or letting up; this is what’s going on. It’s hard to figure out what director Robert Johnson thought would happen. One might forgive a one-person fringe show for looping a three-minute soundbite with a clear beginning and end over and over again, but this is beyond clumsy sound design (Jonathan Graffam) – it’s maddening. 

The play’s structure operates well in the final third. Short, quiet and poignant scenes play out one after the other. But they don’t redeem what has been 40 minutes of Ajax shouting over his wife and daughter (Michelle Robertson and Leikny Middleton) and yelling about his madness or vengeance or whatever. A short scene between mother and daughter is beautifully incongruent and moving on its own. Middleton plays with a sound app on an iPad, while Robertson readies the prayer mats. A mother’s tension and dignity through grief, and attempted patience with her daughter could be taken from this play and held on a pedestal elsewhere. 

There’s lots of good potential in elements of the production,  but they haven’t been crafted together to tell a story.