'Rewrite this ancient end!' Staging transition in post-apartheid South Africa

Aeschylus based his Oresteia, the only full trilogy of Greek tragedies known to us today, on the ancient myth of the house of Atreus and set it in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Nonetheless, the trilogy arguably held great contemporary relevance when it was first performed at the Dionysia festival in 458BCE, as it marked the transition of Athens from a tribal culture to a democratic society governed by constitutional law (Ziolkowski 1977: 20). Throughout the Oresteia Aeschylus dramatizes the meaning and political deployment of justice, concluding his trilogy positively with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of Athens’ new democracy. In this paper, I discuss two dramatic texts that draw on the Oresteia within another context of transitional justice: that of post-apartheid South Africa. The first is Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise, which premiered at the University of Cape Town in 1998. The second is Yael Farber’s MoLoRa (Sesotho for 'ash'), first performed in Germany in 2004. In both plays, the distorted family relations within the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations within South Africa, a nation that was haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance