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Funeral Rites: Eugenio Barba's Feraï
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2021
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In an earlier article [T41] I described Kaspariana, performed by Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark in September 1967. Two years later the Odin Teatret presented another spectacle, Feraï, at the Théâtre des Nations. Feraï enjoyed as much success in Paris, before an audience mostly of students and theatre professionals, as it had several weeks earlier before the audiences of the small towns of Jutland.
The genesis of the play reveals some of the differences between Barba's work and Grotowski's, as well as Barba's special use of the resources of his Jutland province. It was the resident literary advisor of the Odin Teatret, Christian Ludvigsen, the Danish translator of Ionesco and Beckett, who suggested that Barba treat the subject of Euripides’ Alcestis, the sacrifice of a woman who agrees to die in place of her husband, the King of Pherai in Thessaly.
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- Copyright © 1969 The Drama Review
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* Ferai is a play of words on the name Pherai, a Thessalian town, capital of the kingdom of Admetus, and the Latin name of the Faeroe Islands, Ferai, kingdom of Frode Fredegod; the title of the play signals the superimposition of two mythologies, Greek and Scandinavian.
* Perhaps there is here a political lesson as well, with Admetus as Saint-Just and the Chorus incurable Thermidoriens. The Queen's sacrifice would then recall the lesson of Lenin's What To Do? Revolutionaries cannot count on the spontaneous support of the masses, too marked by the sloth of slavery they have known, and so we must stop playing, in the liberal, populist, individualist tradition, with the idea of revolution and seek in a sacrificial life an organization which can serve to set off the revolution, which will be a historical fact and not a parody.