Queen Mary University, London
Red Bull Theater’s Sardanapalus & Global Watch Party Review
By Yuan Ge
I was part of the watch party for the reading of Byron’s Sardanapalus at Queen Mary University of London, where we watched Acts I, IV, and V of the play. During the roundtable discussion afterward, the attendees talked about how the actors and actresses gave an amazing performance. However, some believed that there wasn’t enough range for what the play wanted to convey about Sardanapalus’s transition. The audience, for example, was unsure about how to respond at times to scenes of tragic deaths. Furthermore, attendees pointed out that there was more non-binary potential to be explored in Sardanapalus. The performance also sparked discussions on the ambiguity in Byron’s portrayal of Orientalism in the play: is Orientalism erased as Sardanapalus is sanitized and becomes less “other”? Indeed, in the play, Byron does not mock Sardanapalus. Instead, he tests the idea of a feminized Oriental fantasy, and asks if Sardanapalus is more than this stereotypical image. This is supported by the fact that although he is presented as a weak king, he has strong philosophical arguments about the meaningless of power without pleasure. Myrrha’s presence also problematizes the notion of Orientalism – Byron introduces the tradition of the self-immolation of Hindu widows at their husbands’ funerals, which can be interpreted either as a form of barbarism or as a kind of ideal love existing outside Western traditions. To further complicate this, it was pointed out in the discussion that Myrrha is Byron’s own addition, which turns her into yet another layer in an Orientalist fantasy of auto-da-fé.
Personally, I enjoyed the performance. The spatial limit of a reading means that the audience has more room for reflection, turning it into a participatory experience. When Sardanapalus laments about how the people prefers bloody oppression to his peaceful rule in Act I, for example, he reminds me of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Without elements of extravagant Oriental luxury in the stage setting, the reading brings out the pared-down corporeality of Sardanapalus, making it easier to see the figure of Coriolanus latent inside him. Standing on two opposite ends of traditional masculinity and femininity, Coriolanus and Sardanapalus, when juxtaposed, reveal the precarious nature of physicality as the body becomes a site of conflict: the “rank tongues” of the people bring out a materiality that links Coriolanus’s scarred and aggressive body with Sardanapalus’s soft and hedonistic body. At the end, these “rank tongues” would be weaponized and lead, indiscriminately, to the mutilation of both bodies. The very bareness of the powerful reading performance, however, blurs the line between a monstrous and a normative body. In this way, the reading anticipates the effect of fatalistic and collective forces in the play, where barbarous physicality finally erupts to eliminate deviations.
