A reading of war and desire in the ‘Iliad’
Western literature begins with two contradictory, but equally inseparable elements: on the one hand, the fury and destruction of war; on the other, the irrepressible desire and love between those who love each other. If we accept that the history of our literature begins with the Iliad ofhomerwe also accept that our artistic creation cannot detach itself from this binomial, from this desire to reconcile two antagonistic forces in the same unity, which causes both the exaltation of life and the danger of death. Now, first of all, we must also accept that both coordinates are revealed by their invocation in words, by the call to the muses of memory that mix present, past and future to bring forth narratives and stories that can sing this life and this death.
Rubén de Eguia, stars in the show
A In the middle of so much firepremiered at the Beckett as part of the 2023 Greek Festival, Alberto Conejero recovers this premise of classical creation not only in terms of meaning, but also in terms of the context in which it places the work: from a single character, Patroclus, son of Menecio and companion of Achilles — and, according to some, also a lover—, Conejero recreates the vision of the war conflict between Achaeans and Trojans to explore the outbreak of the different times of history in a single space, the stage space, and the double face of violence and beauty, both bathed simultaneously by desire and by death that trace the two thousand years of history of Western culture and that root us in the past, while at the same time giving us the substrate on which to build what is yet to come .
So, Conejero’s play recovers the voice of this character, rather secondary in the epic poem, to build another version of the Homeric narrative that underlines the elements that often remain in the background when it is explained the story of the Trojan War, as told by Homer. The voice of Patroclus, embodied by the actor Rubén de Eguía and directed by Xavier Albertíis the only one who guides the audience and is present on stage throughout the entire piece, a piece that sometimes becomes an update of the ode to war and the battlefield, an aspect that resonates fiercely in contemporary politics, other times it is transformed into a means of facilitating dialogue between the living and the dead and, in the eighty minutes that the show lasts, it is always a mirror to understand what are the blind spots of the human condition : both our contradictions and our hopes.
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