'The Lost Echo': Introduction

Abstract

'The Lost Echo', Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright's 2006 adaptation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' for the Sydney Theatre Company, gave audiences an epic theatrical experience. It was epic in length, with its eight hours comprising four Acts of two hours; it was epic in scale, using the twelve members of the Sydney Theatre Company's recently formed Actors Company, guest artist Paul Capsis, and a chorus of twenty-four second-year NIDA students. Further, The Lost Echo was epic in artistic and theatrical vision, scope and range of reference, and intellectual rigour. This was especially visible in the selection and arrangement of source myths, the incorporation of other works of literature - such as Euripides' 'Bacchae' - as well as the use of a riot of music and song from sources in classical music, pop and musical theatre, to counterpoint or underscore the words and action. Beyond providing an epic richness of time, scale and range of reference, 'The Lost Echo' also contained a thematic clarity of line to hold together a production as challenging as it was entertaining. Indeed, this thematic clarity, which focused on stories of sex, lust, violence and betrayal, made a specific argument about what Kosky and Wright see as the key elements of Ovid's original text. While other theatrical adaptations of the 'Metamorphoses', such as Mary Zimmerman's 'Metamorphosis' (2001), emphasised the wit, beauty, sentiment and elegant fertility of Ovid's imagination, Kosky and Wright took a muscular approach to Ovid, exposing the destructive cruelty, jealousy and pettiness of the gods in the Graeco-Roman pantheon, and making of the twelve myths selected tragic fables of lust, greed, brutality and selfishness - godly or human. Though beauty, wit and pathos abounded, 'The Lost Echo' had no time for sentiment, finding instead a toughness inside the abundance of Ovid's original fifteen-book epic, selecting myths that explore ideas about sexual boundaries, taboo and degradation. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce 'The Lost Echo' to only one aspect: as I hope the essays in this suite indicate, each part of the play was distinctive in its subject matter, style, and in its interpretation of the selected myths, offering many opportunities for critical engagement.