In Laura Swift and Russell Bender’s engrossing and profoundly thought-provoking play Fragments, a group of classical scholars attempt to piece together the plot of Euripides’ lost play Cresphontes. This isn’t entirely fiction. Cresphontes is a real play, and bits and pieces of it survive in scraps of papyrus and quotations from other writers, some writing long after Euripides’ death. These surviving snippets of text tease, tempt and trouble modern academics, and Swift and Bender’s play is as much about the experience of piecing those fragments together as it is about what the complete original play might have contained.
We could not have a better-qualified guide to this specialised keyhole into a lost classical world. Laura Swift herself is a Tutorial Fellow in Classics at Oxford, and her professional work focuses on fragmentary texts and how we as readers and scholars deal with them. So Fragments is as much an imaginary work of autobiography as it is a detective tale about the secrets of a lost tragedy.
You might think that a bunch of researchers picking over scraps of paper is hardly fertile ground on which to build a piece of imaginative, exciting and even experimental theatre.
But you’d be wrong. Fragments positively seethes with theatricality. As the research assistant (played by Afia Abusham) begins to intone lines from Euripides, music swells in the background, and an actual Greek Muse (Anne Marie Piazza) literally rolls out of a filing cabinet onto the office floor. Over the course of the play the Muse learns English and then gradually takes over the lives of the academics (unbeknownst to them) as she re-weaves the play from antiquity, and the research team find themselves becoming King Polyphontes, Queen Merope and avenging son Aeyptus.
Even the progress of this play is deliberately fragmentary, and hence both frustrating and fascinating. The cast play some scenes multiple times in different ways, seeking the most likely course of the missing plot. They switch into fragments of different genres, matched to the theme of the scene. At one point they’re acting the story as if it’s a Bogart-style hard-boiled detective thriller. At another the researcher is literally listening in on isolated scraps of dialogue (ie fragments) through a Bletchley-Park-style surveillance device. At another, moments of action are reported on as if they are brief news headlines on television.
By coincidence, I saw another play this week that also featured characters spinning putative plot-lines, and then suggesting and enacting multiple alternatives: A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) by Lulu Raczka. If I had one word of caution about this practice it would be that it can build an element of impatience in the onlookers. Audiences crave a narrative, and we do eagerly buy into the one that is offered to us by the show. If that is then negated and replaced multiple times one can find oneself starting to think, Just show me the right story. It’s a delicate path to tread, and Fragments controls our expectations with skill and intelligence.
Perhaps the most powerful and effective aspect of the production is its brilliant and almost magical use of puppetry. Shadow puppets, silhouettes and abstract shapes all leak into the play through the humdrum appurtanences of an everyday office: outlines of Greek figurines swim into the images from the overhead projector; the actors transform into classical warriors while silhouetted through the blinds of an adjoining window. Laura Swift herself explains that puppetry – especially the rough, surreal puppetry of Fragments – capitalises on your brain’s ability to load inanimate objects with stories and symbolism. It forces you to search for a meaning, and to connect the dots. Essentially the puppetry becomes a physical, kinetic representation of fragmentation in its own right. And this theme is carried through to the way the Muse acts as puppeteer to the research team. By the end, they are her playthings, able only to speak the unfinished, tantalising lines that Euripides left behind. I was reminded of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman issue 24 Hours, in which Dr John Dee acts as puppeteer to a diner full of everyday people. But rather than glorying in power and control, the Muse of Fragments is seeking only to tell her ancient tale.
By focusing on a near-lost text, and speculating on its meaning, Fragments ultimately becomes a riveting meditation on the fragmentary nature of our own lives – and it does it with style, music and mystery. This is not a story. Nor is it a story about a story. It’s a story about the experience of discovering stories.