Demeter Geraikos

Building on the potential for an intimate, raw and self-aware telling afforded by playing in 45downstairs, this design concept for Hekabe encircles today’s audience through scenic choices that juxtapose the metaphorical and literal. The design consists of translucent sepia-red tinted curtains as ‘walls’ and a stone bordered sand pit as the stage or ‘orchestra’. The tent and side exits in the text remain but become subverted; the play space is now inside of a modular tent-like space, and the exits sit between the folds of its walls. The violence typically concealed within Hekabe’s tent can either be displayed directly and closely or behind the ‘walls’ as shadows, projection or sound.

By binding the ‘orchestra’ in the venue’s pillars and encasing the seats within curtains, the audience is called to assess their role as passive constructors of the theatre world where this tragedy unfurls. Hekabe becomes suspended, not in its narrative context, the aftermath of the Trojan war, but in a dramatic universe that is aware of, and has accumulated, the previous tellings of Hekabe in myth and on stage; just as Carons’ text has done. Like the crushing of mourner’s claustrophobia, the audience is surrounded by and within the play.