I sat down with Simon to discuss bringing professional experience to the play, the difficulty of adapting the Greek chorus, and what he really wants to convey with the production.
Simon Durandy is a mature student in retirement, doing a masters in Greek and Latin Studies after an illustrious career of directing, acting, and teaching. For him, the yearly Classical Play put on by the department is an opportunity to continue doing what he loves, directing, when he doesn’t have the stamina for the more intensive schedule of a professional or fringe production.
But he hasn’t compromised on his vision for the play. Instead, he told students, he wanted to take the four weeks of 40 hours that would normally compose a production and spread it over five months. He told me the format gives the opportunity for students, who are passionate about theatre, to develop their “already tremendous skills” while still studying full time.
He points out the inequity in funding of the Classical Play despite its popularity; “[it has] a design budget around half of most equivalent SU shows”. However, in honor of UCL200, the Department has provided additional funding. Further support has come from the Watling Fund. This has allowed the production to employ a professional choreographer, sound designer, and fight director.
He spoke warmly of the cast, telling me “they’re absolutely charming and sweet to work with”. “They are an amazing group”, composed of undergraduates and postgraduates. While all of the cast have some form of acting experience, some are fresh from school productions while others are actively involved in professional work.
They are bearing the increased workload of 20 hours a week rehearsals with grace — he jokes, “if they are complaining, they are doing it out of the rehearsal room”.
Aware that he is bringing 30 years of professorial experience to a student production, he acknowledges some of the student spirit of the play may be lost. In its place, a piece of work that he hopes is a true contribution to British theatre. He says he thinks “it’s more important, globally for people to be finding their own way and finding their own language” — highlighting the two “amazing” assistant directors helping him.
The play, which is an original adaptation by Simon, takes place in a contemporary setting. He explains this choice, saying his personal taste lies in more naturalistic, realistic scripts.
While he appreciates the technical aspect and “astonishing piece of aesthetic creation” in a more classical Greek production, what he really wants is to “believe the people on stage are human beings, not choreographic figures, not symbols, not strange apparitions from our subconscious”. By having the play take place in a school, in contemporary prose, he hopes it has “the maximum connection” and “impact on the audience”.
He says he is “indebted to” a version of Iphigenia in Aulis done a few decades ago by Katie Mitchell, saying she has directed some of the best classical Greek plays in British theatre in recent times. Katie Mitchell “solved some of the problems of [adapting] the play really brilliantly” and Simon is “straightforwardly stealing some of those ideas”. Anyone who saw that first production will recognise “some tricks from there”.
Talking about the specificities of the adaptation, he highlighted the challenge of the chorus: “It’s traditional for directors to say the chorus is the most difficult thing to get right in a Greek play”.
The chorus, in the context of Greek theatre, is a group of performers that sing, dance, and narrate throughout. They act as a collective character—such as the ‘citizens of a city’—and provide a commentary or narrative on the action of the play.
Finding a way to fit the chorus into this story was a key part of the adaptive process. In fact, it was when he found, with the help of some translators, that the chorus “could be interpreted to trace a journey from naive excitement, to disillusionment” that he saw “this play really could be very exciting”.
Looking for a group of people “for whom dancing to music was a key thing, [that were] expressing themselves through dance”, caused him to make them a group of TikTok dancers.
He says this is not an attempt to comment on social media, citing the fact he “doesn’t know anything about social media”, because he’s “too old”.
He indicated that there was potential for the thematic implications of the TikTok dancers though. He hopes that the script will be taken on by someone younger with an understanding of social media and the budget to truly explore what it means to learn about war through our phones.
Another theme of the play, “the sacrifice of innocence for the benefit of men”, he says is “enormously pertinent” to the present, “but we’re not drawing any straightforward analogies between this play and Palestine or Syria or the Iraq War”.
Instead, he is focusing on the experience of tragedy. Importantly, maximising “whatever that thing is that we feel when we watch a tragedy”. He hints that there is “a wonderful element to the end of the play, which makes it very bleak and very modern in a way.” This element he thinks leaves the audience “high and dry, there’s a terrible sort of sense of ‘what really happened?’”
He isn’t setting out to tell the audience anything, instead he hopes to be “more deeply committing” by challenging them. Asking them questions about “personality, choice, war, patriarchy, misogyny”.
Talking about the original, Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, he is very clear, “This is a version of that play”. “I think what I’d like to say is that it’s not a free adaptation of the original, insofar as it’s possible to do, it’s a pretty faithful sort of interpretation. Often line by line, even though it’s very idiomatic”.
He acknowledges where they diverge, while the original is written in “fabulous poetry”, he says “I’m not a poet, I can’t do that”. In recognition of this he avoided introducing verse, noting that “almost all translations” are “neither particularly good poetry, nor are they particularly good drama. They get stuck in a sort of poetical no man’s land”.
Instead, he hopes to capture the essential spirit of Euripides’ original. He sees that spirit as a satirical or polemical tragedy, which is “exposing the notion of heroism”—“not just in Agamemnon or Achilles, but also in Iphigenia”.
A play that, like one of his favourite pieces from Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, paints “brilliant, brilliant portraits of deeply limited, troubling men.”.
The UCL Latin and Greek Department told The Cheese Grater: “We hope the production will contribute to UCL200 by showing UCL drama at its very best, and by demonstrating how Classics here is not a backward-looking contemplation of the past but a way to understand ourselves and our world—a source of provocative and challenging questions about who we are today and what we could become. Iphigenia may come from the past but our production is about today.”
The play runs five times from the 11 to 13 February at the Bloomsbury Theatre. You can buy tickets on the Bloomsbury Theatre website.