What a brilliant idea to search for correlations between the classic hero Ajax towards the end of the Trojan Wars full of Sophoclean heroes, hero-worship and god-defined, god-driven battles and the modern warfare, political standoffs and budget-driven offensives.
Well, in short, there lies the problem with Our Ajax. The motivation. That is, the motivation for war, the motivation for genocide, land-power and the selfless human drive to go on when all else is lost. PTSD is disorder post-event! Our Ajax seems to blame trauma on killing sheep he mistakes as his foes. Waterboarding them, akin to the YouTube furor surrounding the treatment of modern war prisoners.
For me, the anachronisms are too great to take seriously. The humour seemed to have come from the audience laughing at the anachronistic reductiveness of the situations rather than the tragedy and waste. A force driven by a weaned DNA-belief in The Gods, and a force created by placing real soldiers, parents, sons and daughters in a theatre of war by suited elected Oxbridge graduates are poles apart and not the stuff for correlation to the affects of war on the puppet-masters’ puppets alongside myth and Greek tragedy.
All this said, David Mercatali directs with an assured flair of the modern and the classic; bringing together verse and prose with alacrity in the sandy DP aesthetic of this bear-pit world. Joe Dixon is superb as the masculine, blood-dripping, sweaty, passionate Ajax. A performance of weight and terror.
The solid cast really needs instruction on arms’ handling and rifle drill to really realise the world they are attempting to inhabit. There is no ‘second nature’ in action from these soldiers. Just reaction and inaction! I am afraid their lack of belief in this world infected me, and perhaps others, to my lack of belief too. A shame.
Orlando Weston
