Being and Not-Being: Euripides’ Helen and the Paradox of Acting

I close by returning to Euripides’ Helen. Our idea of ‘‘Helen’’ wavers constantly between what seems to us a ‘‘real,’’ visible, somatic presence on the stage (the Helen who dwells in Egypt, Menelaus’ chaste wife wooed unlawfully by an Egyptian king) and what we experience as an unreal, invisible, ethereal absence (the phantom-Helen that went to Troy, the adulterous wife of Menelaus). In the eyes of phenomenologically oriented critics of the stage, this ‘‘new Helen’’ (cf. Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria 850) of Euripides exemplifies the ‘‘ontological double status’’ of the actor on the stage, the paradox of being both real and unreal at once (States 1994, 26).

The question of reality and unreality is further probed through the striking disparity between Helen’s and other characters’ perspectives. Helen knows herself, her staged body, to be the real thing, the prototype, while ‘‘Helen of Troy,’’ the phantom fashioned by Hera, is merely an eidolon, a simulacrum of her real self (33-34). The

Eidolon as a mimema of Helen inverts the natural relationship between the actor and the character within the role: it is the actor who is judged as a truthful and persuasive or a false and ineffectual imitation of the character that he or she is called upon to incarnate. Indeed, Helen does seem to think of the eidoelon as a dramatic mask the gods inflicted upon her, a role which stains and destroys her reputation with the enormous weight of duskleia and aischune (ill-repute and shame) that is permanently attached to it (Helen 66-67, 270-72). Yet, in both Teucer’s perspective and in the eyes of Menelaus prior to the play’s ‘‘recognition,’’ it is the phantom-Helen who constitutes the real body, while the stage-Helen living in Proteus’ palace is merely her copy and resemblance (mimema, 74; homoian, 563; eoikas, 579; prospheres, 591), an altogether hateful, ‘‘lethal likeness’’ (echthisten... eiko phonion, 72-73). Though unjustified by the play’s plot, Teucer’s and Menelaus’ perspective restores the normal balance between character and actor: it is the actor’s ‘‘staged’’ body that resembles or demonstrates or even ‘‘lives’’ a bodiless shape, an absent character, an empty onoma (name). But in a play where all manner of certainty is thrown into confusion, irreconcilable perspectives have an unsettling effect on our vision: how can we tell the real from the counterfeit, the prototype from its lookalike? who should we ultimately believe to be the real Helen, if such a thing exists? The soma or the onoma, the visible or the invisible, the actor or the part?

More intensely than any other classical tragedy, Euripides’ Helen casts light on the perceptual problems associated with stage-acting. Yet no pat answers are provided. In the mirror of this play, as in all Athenian tragedy, modern performance theories will be able to discern parts of their own image. No single reflection will amount to more than a glimmer, yet all the images taken together demonstrate tragedy’s dynamism and versatility as a generic form that ceaselessly turns itself and its performance into an object of inquiry. The ancient actor, as configured by the tragic texts, has multiple resonances in Western performance history, in theory as well as in practice.