Fragments, an imaginative search for a lost play by Euripides

Fragments at the Old Fire Station Oxford, on Saturday, May 13 and Sunday 14. Review by JON LEWIS

Form mirrors content in the play Fragments, co-written by Russell Bender, artistic director of Potential Difference and Laura Swift, a classics professor at Oxford University. First conceived in 2014 at Oxford’s Think Human Festival, Fragments is an imaginative search for a lost play by Euripides called Cresphontes. Only a few lines of the play exist, on papyrus, and these fragments are the source of much conjecture.

The set (designer, Lucy Sierra) is an Oxford University lab, intricately conceived so that it integrates screens for projections and shadow puppets (puppeteer, Jess Mabel Jones). Office cabinets reveal hiding places for characters from which to emerge as well as offering sites for fleetingly glimpsed tableaux.

The central characters are Anthony (Clive Mendus, well known for his work with Complicite), an elderly professor, Rachel (Rosie Thomson), his grouchy colleague, and Sam (Afia Abusham), Anthony’s phd student who is tasked with interpreting the language and style of the papyrus scribe. Somehow, the academics conjure up a spirit from the past (Anne Marie Piazza) after reading a note in the margin of a shred of papyrus that spells out ‘I need your help’. She’s sings invocations that hint at the true meanings of the text but is a ghostly figure who the others do not see.

With original music by Jon McLeod and lyrics by Victoria Saxton, the girl’s songs include a fragmented range of styles from opera to Sondheim-like musical numbers. She forges a telepathic link with Sam who begins to parrot her words that were first forged by Euripides thousands of years earlier.

Zeus-like, the girl then conjures up the central character from Cresphontes, the avenger Aeyptus (Akiel Dowe), a young man who wants to kill his uncle in revenge for murdering his brother (fascinatingly foreshadowing the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). Much of the fun in the drama is watching how the girl encourages the academics to develop multiple, fragmented versions of possible scenarios as if the play exists in several parallel universes. Euripides’ intentions are not meant to be clear so it’s left to the audience to invent an ending of their choice.