Prometheus Bound
But I say leave the script to the historians and academics and keep it out of the hands of directors. If you think nothing happens in Beckett’s dramas, you haven’t read this snoozefest. At the top of the play, Prometheus gets chained to a rock while Zeus’s goon Power and his unwilling handyman Hephaestus make big speeches. That’s the end of the action. Of course Prometheus is being punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind–but more to the point for theatergoers, he can’t move or gesture for the rest of the play.
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Avramovich’s attempt at a theatrical analogy for a politically and historically complicated conflict goes no further than Prometheus’s chains. In fact, he’s saddled himself with a work full of mythological allusions and pantheistic beliefs that make no sense given the contemporary stage world he’s set up. The entire production feels hopelessly out of joint–the classic symptom of update-itis. Trying to make the play relevant, he’s turned it opaque.
