Les larmes de Clytemnestre

In a deliberately modern style, Marie-Pierre Cattino portrays a Clytemnestra standing before her judges. She is the outraged mother and the queen who refuses to relinquish the throne upon her husband’s return from war. A loving mother and a woman of power, this Clytemnestra is not the horrific figure portrayed in the ancient myth. A thoroughly feminist vision in its modernity.

My Clytemnestra is a woman who demands justice, asks to be heard, and walks tall and proud.
I wanted her to spur us on, to move us forward – us, her fellow citizens of today. Her action is indeed that of a murderer with blood on her hands, who already knows her sentence and realises she is doomed in the face of children who have taken their father’s side. It is this action—driving the knife between Agamemnon’s ribs—that is on trial here: the murder of a husband and his mistress.

I saw my Clytemnestra, proud on the inside but in disarray on the outside. She will deliver her words, her silence, her chant and her clashes.
I drew the strength of her character from the lived experience of our times, that of the world’s cities. And since theatre questions form, I wondered how these beings of light could have given rise to the monsters of humanity—those very monsters whose tragic existence has compelled us to reflect on the human condition?