A Symposium on Medea

FIONA SHAW AS MEDEA Photo courtesy of the University Musical Society University
of Michigan
Last fall the Abbey Theatre of Ireland's acclaimed production of Euripides' Medea
came to the University of Michigan. On October 18, 2002, a symposium about the
play and the production convened in which distinguished scholars on the faculty of
the university asked questions of the play's director, Deborah Warner, and the lead
actress, Fiona Shaw. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of the conversation.
Yopi be Prins, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, moderates the panel,
whose members include Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (Classics), Linda Gregerson
(English), Katherine Mendelo (Drama, Residential College), and Ruth Scodel

(Classics). The panel was co-sponsored by the University Musical Society and by
"Contexts for Classics," a faculty consortium recently formed at the University of
Michigan to explore past, present, and future contexts for Classical studies. MQR is
grateful to Warren Williams, of the University Musical Society, and to Claire Malloy,
for their assistance in preparing the text and photographs for publication.

katherine mendelo: As someone who has worked with adapting and modernizing
Classical translations, I had a question for Deborah specifically about one of the
most dicult challenges a director faces when encountering this work and trying to
make it contemporary and relevant for a modern audience: what to do with the
chorus? Because the Greek chorus obviously had its own function in its time. I want
to ask you, Deborah, about your conception of the chorus and the choice to make
them individuals rather than a mass. Would you speak some more about what you
want the audience to learn from the choices you made?

deborah warner: Well, I think that one always has another production playing in one's
mind as well as the play that one has made, and it has always been a source of
inspiration to me to think what would happen if one could have a chorus of 500 or
600 women. Now there are certain problems involved in that, and even this wellendowed university might not have been able to aord to bring that particular
production here, but it has always rather haunted me because this notion, that "the
women" of a town and in this case Corinth arrive, is a rather extraordinary notion.
And truly, if 600 of the local women were prepared to sit on the lawn outside Medea's
house, you would have the most astonishing situation, Greenham Common revisited,
or whatever great female protest there might be, and it would make the playing of the
scenes terribly exciting and very challenging: Jason arriving and having to break
through 600 women who are now camping outside his house. So that's the one I
haven't done, but I think that's a very good option for the film should it ever be
made.
I've only ever tackled two Greek tragedies, Elektra with Fiona almost ten years before
this. And what happened when I came to Medea was that I had the courage to be
more individual in terms of the characterization of each of these women than I had
ten years before. I was convinced that making the chorus into individuals wouldn't
work ten years ago. I do believe it's worked very, very well with this particular
production, and for those of you who haven't seen it there are not 600 of them, there
are just five. We began with eight, in fact, and this production has had three stages to

its life and we've now gone down to five, which does work for the group of actresses
better. What we have done is break their texts down into individual roles, which we
know very well is not how these dramas were initially approached. But our
perception that the chorus are so profoundly part of this drama that they actually
provide an emotional musical score for the evening helped us understand this
extraordinarily dicult journey that we are being asked to follow. And having had
three choruses now, the first of which I must say were very weak, and the second
which were a little better, and the third which are very strong now, I do know that
Fiona's work is made much more possible by a certain burden being taken o. The
chorus are throwing enormous light, they're not commenting, they are somehow
sometimes explaining moments to us. And where they did have a rhythmic and
musical place once upon a time at the start of tragedy, I think that we've recreated
that eect again; somehow they are the heartbeat underneath this play. They work
much harder than you may see, and when they are not working as hard as this, the
production absolutely flops and falls and dies.

katherine mendelo: I had the chance to speak with the people in the chorus after
the performance on Wednesday night, and one thing that they brought up to me was
the idea of paparazzi, the people who are attracted to celebrities, autograph hunters,
that sort of thing, and even the eating of the crisps came directly from an event when
someone came to a funeral with potato chips. I was thinking of the role of the
paparazzi in Princess Diana's death, for example, because they brought up Princess
Diana as an example of someone of that kind of size and people wanted to be
around her and actually their voracious interest in her was the cause of her
destruction. But there is a question that you dealt with really beautifully in a nonverbal way, which is that these are women of Corinth and they identify with Medea as
a woman, but that she destroys their society. To some degree they collude with
Medea on the killing of the princess, even though the princess is going to continue
their royal line. So when the messenger came in and gave the speech about the
princess's death they were each of them in her own way traumatized by her
complicity in the death. It's a very rich choice that you've made about how people
change from being observers to being actors in an event bigger then they are.

deborah warner: We know that Medea is an extremely famous figure in the world.
There is only one question about a Greek chorus and that is why they turn up. I can
assure you that when we made Elektra it took me three weeks' work to try and
discover why they turned up. It's very, very problematic. And were I to go back to

that production, I'd have to concede now that, of course, Elektra is famous too.
She's so wrecked and so lost in her grief that onetempted to feel that people may
have forgotten about her, but she's a very powerful man's daughter and people will
know who she is. So Medea is an easier play for moving into due to the fact that
there's two immensely famous giants of the world living up in this house and people
are likely to come and visit and gawk at them, but I don't suspect that the chorus
have ever been there before.

yopie prins: Fiona, do you have any thoughts on interacting with the chorus as part
of your performance?

fiona shaw: I can understand anybody approaching the play having diculty with the
chorus, and the chorus themselves having diculty with what they have to do, which
is to follow the argument, sometimes contradict the argument, sometimes accept the
argument, which is probably very like what the audience is going through. There is a
wonderful line where they suddenly feel very sorry for Glauke, that she just happened
to be the king's daughter. So they're in a very, very dicult position. As an actress I
am entirely dependent on them; what Deborah says is correct. One of them,
particularly, is an absolute inspiration, the energy! She whacks into it. If I'm in
diculty she sort of sends electricity. Just pow! And of course they are terribly tired,
as I am, at the end of the play, because we do it without an intermission. The hour
and a half is exactly the length that you can endure this play. Between performances
the chorus are all out having massages and saunas trying to undo the tension. The
performance functions from tension, it doesn't function from ease. It's something to
do with the Greek chorus being much nearer an operatic chorus where music was
able to release the performers from the buildup of energy. If you take away the
music, in a way the actors have to write their own music, and it's much harder both
for them and for the director to conduct it.

deborah warner: And I would add, for what it's worth, that this particular actor that's
just been mentioned did everything in her power to not be cast this time round. And
when I asked why, she said look, it's terribly dicult for the chorus because they
have no release at the end of the evening. There is none of the cathartic enjoyment, if
that is the right word, that Jason and Medea have, which I think is rather hard to
quantify, but they do get somewhere and they finish. Whereas the chorus are left

absolutely stripped of their skin and hung up on a washing line and blowing in the
wind and have no way of coming down at all.

ruth scodel: My question is probably more for Fiona, but maybe not just her. I've
seen a fair number of Medeas and I've read a lot of scholarship about funny
passages in Greek tragedy, but I don't think it had ever occurred to any of us that
Medea could be funny. And the first half of this production was very funny indeed. My
fourteen-year-old daughter laughed until she started crying. The evening started me
thinking about how many Greek tragedies in fact you could do that with. Oedipus
Rex could probably be a howler [laughter] right up to Jocasta's big exit. So what I'm
asking is how you came to think of doing it that way and extracting all this humor
from lines that are normally proclaimed instead of tossed out. It was wonderful, but it
was a total surprise.

fiona shaw: I think it was probably a surprise to us too. There are two reasons for it:
one is that I've worked with Deborah a lot and so my only function in the rehearsal
room is to entertain her. One of the reasons I love working with Deborah is that she is
so clear and I'm so muddled; most of my ideas are really bad. The really nice thing
about my ideas is that Deborah gets hysterical laughing at them. We'd come across
a lot of stories about what happens to people in this illogical state of sexual jealousy
of which there are many tragic and also terribly comic examples in the newspapers
every day. There was a friend of my parents and he cut the bed in halfthey had a
beautiful antique bed, and, you know, it's a symbol, isn't it? And there is a man in
America I'd read about, that when the judge said he must give half of all his
possessions to his ex-wife, he got up on the house and with a chain saw halved the
house. And it's completely understandable when the logic of the thing goes out the
window. People have cut their husband's suits in half. There is wonderful case in
England of a woman who took her husband's wine collection and delivered two
bottles of vintage wine to everyone in the neighborhood. Revenge is a very odd dish,
and best served cold, as they say.
So there's a lot of comic aspects. We were also into burning sheets. I began to wear
various face masks. There was a Darth Vader mask I wore for a while and Deborah
enjoyed that very much. The domestic life is full of comedy. There is something so
functionally misfitting about husbands and wives probably anywhere, that the
triumph of humanity is that people stay together at all. The play is a very a-domestic
play. There are not many jokes in Elektra, mind you. There are no jokes in Elektra.

Medea is about marriage and something about marriage is intrinsically funny

because there is something comic about the conceptual framework which Euripides
seems to have got. The arguments which are very intellectual and very clear between
the two sexes have a sort of fundamental disjuncture between their understanding of
life. Jason has a point and it is not fundamentally wrong that a man marries and
doesn't really want to settle. One can completely understand it. One can also
understand that a woman once she settles doesn't want her husband to marry
somebody else. These are very important situations, but they are full of humor. In a
tragedy, you have to understand the characters as well-rounded realistic people and
real life is full of humor. I played Hedda Gabler directed by Deborah and I found that
one of the most entertaining and humanizing things for me in that role was that
someone could watch their own tragedy and be amused by it, whilst in it.

ruth scodel: The goal of Seneca's Medea is to turn into Euripides' Medea. That's
what Seneca's people are like. But your Medea, I had a feeling she had a certain
distance from being Medea and I guess that's what you're saying.

fiona shaw: A demi-goddess? Medea as a sort of demigod? Last night I watched on

the Discovery or Biography channel the life of Diana, and it was very interesting that
she couldn't have been Medea because Diana had done nothing before she married
Prince Charles. The Medea you meet in the play is a woman who's done an
enormous amount of things, some of them amoral. But it doesn't matter. They're
things that have made her famous already and they are achievements unlike our
Hollywood associations where the achievement is quite slight. Medea's achievement
is very real and so she's in that way a very complicated person, and the play a
complicated piece of writing. Someone says, "Why did I ever leave my father's house
and trust a Greek?" I think it's interesting that something like that can be written
about two lines after "I'll kill the children." It's not just that it's humorous at the
beginning, it's that the ironies go on unfolding in a more perverse way the deeper
into the play you read; we are terribly morally reductive in our generation in that we
think serious things are serious and funny things are funny. The terrifying truth is that
they live cheek by jowl together.

benjamin acosta-hughes: In the text of Euripides there are a number of lines that are
contested; they may or may not belong to the play and when we read them in Greek

class we have them in brackets. To what extent are you bound by the text in your
performance? I mean, to what extent is it ever an impediment and you have to work
beyond it or around it?

fiona shaw: Once you agree on a text you have to be pretty true to that text or else
you probably would improvise the play and Medea is not a play there for improvising.
I'm not an enormous admirer of all of the translation of this version. I'd love to go
back to Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael and say "iron that bit out" but
rewriting a translation just isn't quite livable, you know. The translation hasn't got too
many composite nouns, which is a great relief. There's not too much "bloodlust" and
"tablecloth" and things like that.

deborah warner: I'm very bound by the text once I've committed to one. I think there
could be a dreadful production of Medea available on this text, no question. There
could be some extremely wooden and troublesome stu and I'm not sure that the
very first time we went out with this that it was particularly fluent. We worked and
worked away within this frame and we are extremely true to Kenneth McLeish and
Frederic Raphael. We finally wrestled it to the ground. It did take a lot of time and I
think to a degree it took rather a lot of courage, you know, because, I'm slightly
embarrassed to remember, some of this stu was there for my entertainment early on
in rehearsal. I thought oh, goodness, we can't do that, and partly because of the
history of Fiona's complete shock and the horror when she found out that there were
no jokes in Elektra at all, and to a degree mine because I'd worked on Titus
Andronicus and indeed King Lear and did think that there was no tragedy at all
available without humor. I really did think that.

yopie prins: Benjamin, what's the line you mentioned just before our panel began
that ends with "a husband" that you thought was played perfectly?

fiona shaw: He was everything to me and now he is the vilest man alivemy
husband [applause].

benjamin acosta-hughes: Out of curiosity, when you initially started thinking about
doing Medea, did you look at a number of dierent translations?

deborah warner: I was interested in Kenneth McLeish's work because he had been
responsible for the Elektra. So I did look at others, but I came to this one for its
simplicity and boldness. I sat in an airport reading it because I had to make a
decision very quickly about whether we were going to do this translation or not, just
reading the three Jason and Medea scenes. They read much more like Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? or Streetcar than like a classical text and that was very appealing to
me. I wanted something with that more immediate and contemporary bite. Perhaps I
should have done a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which I long to do,
but Fiona's not old enough. But I shall wait for that.

fiona shaw: Next year . . . next week.

linda gregerson: We had a study group a couple of weeks ago and someone brought
up a question that I'd love your help with. It was about stepping back a bit into the
very broad and indeed popularized distant reception of this play. Even people who
don't know the play at all know that it's about Medea's killing of her children. The
person who spoke said there is one other myth in which this foreknowledge works.
We think that we know Oedipus or that we know Medea without knowing the plays or
the myths in any of their detail, but about Oedipus we have other ways of imagining
the really brute contours of the story. There is a Freudian manner, but we don't need
to go there if we understand it as a figure for the common fate of human kind, that at
some level just by the sort of assaultive ironic aront of our surviving our parents, we
kill them and that that's a harsh thing for human beings to contemplate or assimilate.
But we don't have alternate ways of taking in that brute distillation of the Medea
story. It's, in fact, unassimilable. It's not something that we can eat or digest. I
wonder if maybe you think that's not the case; I'd love your thoughts or some
assistance with that.

fiona shaw: It's to Deborah, but may I just say one thing? I think there are many ways
of killing children and I think that children are killed all the time actually. And I have
no academic relationship to the play at all except that when you spend all these

weeks on it you begin to meditate on the fact of it. There's a term which is think is a
psycho-therapeutic term so it may have only a temporary relevance, but it's
"narcissistic parents." Jason and Medea, as are mine, are narcissistic parents. My
parents spend their time in permanent battle with each other. I don't think I was
killed, I think my elder brother was killed though he walks the planet. And I think that
there are levels in this play like the rungs of a ladder that are remarkably pertinent, to
the point that some of the audience's attention is not at the horror of the play, but at
the recognizable stages of the play. You are absolutely right that we have a notion
that Medea is a woman who kills her children, they're sort of irrelevant, a very
excessive unusual end to a lurid newspaper story. There's piles of warning in it: be
careful if you are leaving your spouse to protect them. The whole crass mythology of
western society that children come first is just not truehuman passion comes first
and children are merely the oshoot of that passion and our endless belief and our
endless playing out ofsorry I'm on a roll nowparents saying to children "all the
things I've done for you." Adults do things for each other. Adults will kill to preserve
passion no matter what and I think the play is a massive warning sign about that
fact.

deborah warner: I think that's beautiful. That's exactly what it is. Approaching Medea
as a witch and sorceress is a terrible impediment and there's absolutely no question
that that was the hardest hurdle of all. It's very dicult to get over. I do believe we
got over it. This journey is so complicated and so extraordinary, the one hour and
thirty minutes of how she does finally come to this horrible place of killing their two
children. It does come as a surprise and I do think that's marvelous because we all
know exactly where the evening's going to end when we enter the theater. That's
Euripides' genius. He has actually taken us on a journey that still allows the most
famous incident in the play to be a surprise and a shock.

linda gregerson: May I ask one follow-up question? The opposition between sexual
passion and at some level the accident or by-blow of biological reproduction is
something Fiona's comment brought to vivid light. This play seems to meditate on
the other aspect of having children; there is a choral speech about the whole
question, "why do people seem to have children? It just makes them more liable to
disaster." Is there anything we are supposed to be learning about, not simply the
sometimes disastrous opposition between sexual passion and what it yields in
familial terms, but also the two modes of having children: the one that has them in
the mind and the one that has anything but them in mind?

deborah warner: In a ghastly way the children are secondary, as Fiona has said, to
this overwhelming passionate aair between Jason and Medea. This is not the first
woman who's been abandoned nor the last but she's possibly one of the few women
who has killed her brother and then been abandoned. Thus the impossibility of
what's occurring in the playJason really can't leave because Medea has murdered
a member of her family for him and I think that is indeed a lesson: if you give
everything that there is to give for passionate love, that's what happens when it goes
wrong and there we are, children or no children.

fiona shaw: Supposedly we belong to that particular generation of absolutely

admiring people who give up everything for love. Probably the notion was started by
the Brontes, but we are still in that hangover of Romantic passion as being the
highest form of love, and presumably, the children produced from such passion are
all the more precious. And I think this play really pulls one up short on that illusion to
say: do we want these explosions of passion that produce children who are then . . .
?

deborah warner: There isn't that much room in the play for developing the roles of
those two children. The actors played them very nicely, but I don't think there are
individual moments that you can really work upon to create individualized characters.
They're not in the play to demand our attention.

katherine mendelo: This was the most sensual production of Medea that I have ever
seen. It was very erotically charged; the casting chemistry between Jason and
Medea was palpable. And the amount of time they were physically connected was
really, really eective . . . I'm looking at it directorially. That powerful sexual attraction
was revolutionary in terms of helping me see them as these two monoliths: Jason.
Medea. The other thing was the children were sensual creatures too because the
language is, look at their soft faces, their soft eyes, and the way Fiona touched them.
They're boys too. They're little Jasons and so some of the erotic or animal
attachment to these little boys really came through and that was just wonderful.
And I wanted to just ask you, Fiona, about your development of the physicality of the
character because on the one hand there was this very strong erotic energy from

you. I had never seen that scene with Aegeus in sexual terms before, as a seduction,
and you played it that way and it made perfect sense to me that that was how he
was going to get children. I thought you were going to throw a spell and that was
how he was going to get children. But it was actually a kind of swivel of your hips
that sent the message to him "wait till we get to Athens." But also your physicality
was very awkward at times and you looked as though you were uncomfortable in
your body, a woman who had been sexually awakened by Jason and then
abandoned and therefore why were you carrying this body around and what do you
do with it? I wanted you also to tell me, in your imagination, when you dismembered
your brother, did you do it in a dierent way than when you killed your children?

fiona shaw: It's a problem for all of us whether sins of an earlier life cling to us,
whether we can or can't get them out of our systems. Certainly, people remember
them. If you were a bank robber in your early twenties or if you took drugs, it's very
hard if you become president of a country because people do want to name your
earlier behavior as being someway a prelude to your present behavior and, of course,
it may or may not be so. We have to forgive ourselves our sins in order to move on.
(It is a reason to try and be good so that you don't have these things clinging to you.)
There's something fundamentally anti-academic about doing plays. For instance, the
way in which you find things is often through an opposite. If the play is about hate,
which is an intellectual notion, uh, a passionate notion, you'll probably find it though
love theatrically. The arguments Jason and Medea have are about parting; but if
every sinew in your body is about getting back together, that's much nearer the
human experience. So it's terribly hard to study these plays and it's very hard to
rehearse them too because one is drawn always to the intellectual power of the
argument but in fact the tension comes from the at-odds-ness between wanting one
thing and thinking you want another. That's where a lot of us live. If you have a Jason
who is so fantastically identifiable as a hero as Jonathan Cake [the lead actor] is,
there's multiple griefs about leavetaking. There's a wonderful line in a play I just did
recently with Deborah, "there is no greater grief than to find no happiness but
happiness in what is past." It's unlikely that Medea will ever meet a man remotely like
Jason again anyway. He's magnificent and I think that people are often in love with
somebody's magnificence. I'm not sure she's in love with his soul or his intelligence
or anything like that. He is just a fantastic example of humanity and he is the father of
her children. You could cast Joe Pesci as Jason and it might be all very, very
sensuous, but it would be a dierent kind of relationship

deborah warner: Last night when Jonathan came on I was sitting next to an elderly
man who turned to his partner and said, "That's Jason." He's recognizable, that's for
sure. You asked about the physical and how it develops. I think that's very much
about actors and rehearsing. It comes absolutely through the center of what's
happening within the rehearsal room. It's organic and one can't invent any of that. I
mean, the enormous application in making theatre is the choice of cast. You know,
that is the big directorial starting point and indeed a statement of sorts. It's like
painters choosing the colors they lay out on their palettes. That's going to be what
you work with and it can go a hundred ways, but it is all-defining.
I'm not sure we are going to get to a question about the witch and the sorceress, but
a lot of what we're talking about knocks into that. We can't define anybody by the
term "witch" without considering that if she had magical powers she wouldn't be in
this trouble. She'd sort it out and I think if one looks back over the deeds she has
become famous for, one of them is that she killed the serpent coiled around the
fleece. Well, brave, but not necessarily magical. The other one: that she killed the old
king by a fabulous trick where she told the daughters that if she cut him up and put
him in a pot she could lift him out new and young. And so she demonstrated this by
cutting up an old ewe and lifting out a lamb. But this is rabbit in a hat stu, which has
been done and could be done again today. So at the point at which this play begins,
I don't think we can truly believe that this woman is possessed of magical powers
because she'd do something to save herself and her problem is she can't do
anything.

ruth scodel: There is one place where you obviously didn't do what Euripides did: the
conclusion where Medea doesn't have the magical object on which she escapes. But
you end the production with Medea remaining on his level, easily accessible to him. If
she had the corpses on her chariot which is on the roof or on the crane or
something, of course Jason can't get to them. But here you have to ask, if he really
wants the bodies why doesn't he just go in and get them. Maybe it's another way of
pointing out that the children are not really what the play's about. I got the feeling
that they may linger there forever unless the Corinthians come and kill them.

deborah warner: I'm very suspicious about this chariot, because a lot of our
understanding about this chariot is a helpful little stage direction that we often see in
texts inserted toward the end of the play. Medea says in the text that her father's
father holds her high above her enemies, she absolutely says she's untouchable,

she's born on high, she's above. But she is so Other at the moment of the final
entrance as we play it. Fiona walks in carrying the two dead children. She is utterly
untouchable. There is nobody who would touch her and I believe that the reason he
doesn't kill her is because there is nothing left to kill. I don't think it's worth his while.
Whatever this chariot meant to the ancient Greeks, I'm not sure that it meant exactly
what many of us think it does, that she was somehow absolved of all her crimes. The
Greek world didn't have chariots either. They didn't exist and this notion that they
were a little bit higher up and Jason couldn't get to them, nonsense. I mean, my
Jason could get anywhere. He could get halfway up the Empire State Building if he
wanted because he would climb. Even 2500 years ago, there would be a similar
problem at the end: why doesn't Jason climb up that little house at the back of the
stage and rip her apart? I think it's because he doesn't want to.

fiona shaw: Whatever people's religious beliefs I think that probably history will say
that we are a post-theistic generation. I don't know whether that is correct or fair, but
the play does seem to indicate the emptiness or the hollowness by which the gods
aect us. It would be much easier if we were all sure whether there is one god or
whether there are a lot of gods and whether they are benign or whether they don't
exist at all, but there is a hint that they don't exist at all in the play. I was rather fliply
saying to Deborah that the Greeks didn't have flying chariots, but we do and our
flying chariots have just recently done terrible damage. So it might have been more
soluble to say, put her in an airplane and let her fly away, but it wouldn't have been
comvincing in this sort of post-Beckettian world that we live in theatrically. We didn't
know how to solve it. For weeks and weeks I was climbing up walls and jumping o
ropes and jumping into the audience and none of them really rang true to the
aesthetic of the production.

deborah warner: Even if she were lifted away we would still be dealing with the
condition that she was in. It's not full of celebration, the last notes of this play. There
is a stumbling block in all of this which is, what is this thing sent up to the palace that
ignites the king and princess and is this magic or not? Something goes up there and
certainly it's a little bomb in a box and it does explode and sets fire to the princess,
but what does occur up there? This is where the messenger's speech is very very
interesting. The reason for the extraordinary length of the speech where he describes
the events up there is that that speech makes the killing of the children inevitable for
Medea. She has to kill the children because if she doesn't, there will be more savage
hands following along after her. So at that moment she is doing it for a quite another

reason to any of the reasons she may have spoken about, boasted about. And what
has happened up in that palace is much bigger, much, much bigger than one
princess with a burning frock and her father getting caught in the blaze of it. I mean
the place is destroyed. Clearly the speech describes something so colossal that the
world has come to an end. I don't believe there's any Corinth left at the end of this
play and I don't believe that those women are going home. I don't think there's
anywhere to go. I mean, it's Hiroshima. It's a nuclear bomb that's gone o in there,
or alarmingly, there is an 11th of September connection somehow because that boy
describes something so huge, something so much bigger possibly than her intention
and I think we could say that's true of September the 11th. I don't expect whoever
did it expected that the two towers would both fall down. Nobody did. It was
unbelievable. And I do believe that someone coming to tell Bin Laden what had
happened, he knew at that moment that he would have to kill his children indeed.
And the history of the world was finished. Something just out of all proportion has
occurred in this play and that's the horrific aspect of it.

yopie prins: There are two impulses, then. On the one hand to bring the action down
to domestic scale and diminish the heroic and world historical, creating toys out of
the Argo and all of the elements that are beyond the story, but at the same time
there's a pivot and then suddenly we are into something way beyond the domestic
scale.

deborah warner: It can't stay merely domestic. The domestic is absolutely the door
to the epic, but you can't enter the epic without going through the door.