The suppliants (Aeschylus)

The suppliants by Aeschylus: chronicles of an impossible escape

First presented in the probable date of the 60s of the 5th century BC, The suppliants are the first of three tragedies that Aeschylus dedicated to the saga of the Danaids, being also part of this trilogy the lost dramas of the Egyptian and Danaids. Danaus’s 50 daughters, supposed to marry the 50 Egyptian cousins, flee the Nile, their home, to seek political and religious asylum in Argos. Before the king of this land, they plead for protection, presenting as a more important argument the common descent from the same woman, Io, in an even more remote mythological past. Arriving in Greece by sea, these women are the ancient paradigm of a group of exiles – self-exiled, in their case – who demand the protection of another people, of another culture. The journey is a striking motif throughout the play, since the Danaids are in transit between two countries, between two nations. They refuse a homeland that was theirs, of whose lineage they were descendants, and advocate the ancestry of their Greek origin to be received and protected from the cousins who persecute them, promising, more than a noble marriage, the violence of a wedding that will take away their nobility privileges and the autonomy of decision. It is, of course, a question of various political constraints. But the drama of these women – who, in the following plays, would be the murders of their cousins, by order of their father – is easily identifiable with that of so many other women who, in a timeline that essentially does not change, escape any kind of violence imposed on them. Barbarians, they come to a land they say is theirs, but those who see them cannot identify them as Greeks. With no homeland, terrified by the male host of enemies who persecute them, this group seeks in the altars of the gods of the new city a refuge that some Greek can refuse. And the cousins, hawks following the doves of similar plumage, come eager for blood and revenge. In the air is, for Greeks and Egyptians, the promise of a war for the possession of the young women. The blood shed on the battlefield and in the bridal beds in which the Hymenaeus would be consummated, is present from an early phase. (Carlos Jesus, translator)

Voice-over: José Pedro Xavier, Ian Cezerin, Artur Magalhães, João Branco, Rui Gomes, Miguel Fonseca, Luís Carvalho e Marco Pereira

Cast: José Ribeiro Ferreira (Danaus), Rodolfo Lopes (Pelasgus), Pedro Sobral (Herald), Ana Seiça, Andrea Seiça, Carla Coimbra, Cátia Gouveia, Carina Fernandes, Cláudia Sousa, Daniela Pereira, Elisabete Cação, Iolanda Mendes, Marta Bizarro, Margarida Cardoso, Tânia Mendes (Suppliants)