Sappho...in 9 Fragments

Synopsis

As Sappho herself reminds us: all education is a form of seduction. Your lesson begins now. 2700 years ago, Sappho is the world's first love poet, the tenth muse of the ancient Greeks, and the inspiration for every lovelorn writer and songster since. But history catches up with her, and over time, Sappho becomes just a gap to be filled with the lusts and desires of each new generation... Sappho...in 9 fragments is a roller-coaster, tour de force through two and a half millennia of Sappho's story, weaving together the strange tale of her fragmented reception with a contemporary love story in her own words. As a timeless Sappho relives her uses and abuses through history, in the modern world a heart-broken young woman tries to piece together the fragments of her sexual awakening.

Our Review:

21 January 2013

Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess who is the subject of this one-woman show, is remarkable as much for what we don't know about her as what we do. Given the potential left wide open by the lack of any definitive Sappho story, it is a shame playwright and academic Jane Montgomery Griffiths came up with this.

All guff and thunder, the play is a mess of reference, ellipsis and scholarly self-satisfaction. Attempts to intertwine abstract monolouging with a sketchy modern love/coming-out story are ill-managed and stretch the performance too thin (not to mention too long). The performance space beneath Stoke Newington's heady White Rabbit cocktail bar was intimate and atmospheric, but when faced with poor material this can only do so much. Without a BA in Classical Literature, much of the play's erratic exposition will mean little. While it's easy to see why Griffiths might want to present Sappho, a famously fragmentary figure, through the medium of fragmented prose, it serves...

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