Review: Sappho at Southwark Playhouse Elephant

Wendy Beckett’s new play, Sappho, co-directed with Adam Fitzgerald, explores the love and life of the Grecian poetess Sappho (Georgie Fellows) with an abundance of debates on contemporary politics. Sappho is intoxicated with the dancing girl Adore (Eleanor Kane), but an arranged marriage bounds her to Hercules, the son of the oligarch on Lesbos Island. Her mission aims at further democratising the island and alleviating its “debt”.

In the trailer or introductory page for Sappho, the audience is assured that no prior knowledge of Greek history or culture is necessary to enjoy the show. This is true. Otherwise, one cannot resist but feel a huge sense of discordance, watching people from 6th century BC debating concepts such as representative democracy, rights, freedom of speech, free will, class, and women’s empowerment – a mixture of 18th and 19th century philosophical legacies and issues relevant to the last decade.

The sassy queer narrator (Emmanuel Akwafo), a much Quince-like figure, constantly reminds us that we are in an imaginary space in-between the 6th century and our contemporary reality. This is emphasised by Halcyon Pratt’s set design, where glittering streamers transform the venue more akin to a drag cabaret. Yet such in-betweenness has not been underlined, but rather dissolved in those debates that indicate stark dichotomies: love against marriage, the rich against the poor, the elite against the low, and maybe the labour against the tory. Those dichotomies clearly overshadow Sappho’s love story.

Furthermore, those debates will end in nowhere – just like the Platonic tradition of dialectics. To resolve such debates, an abrupt twist is planted into the plot. Under the help of Aphrodite, Sappho marries Hercules who is actually her lover Adore – she secretly disguises herself as a young man without revealing her true identity to anyone but Sappho. This narrative development resonates closely with the end of John Lyly’s Galatea, in which the two heroines fall in love with each other’s male disguise, and Aphrodite also arranges their final consummation.

The music and physicality stand out – a hearty blend of the spirit of Eros, Dionysus and Aphrodite. Under the choreography of Fotis Diamantopoulos, the dances and movements are crystalised and sacred, yet also sensual and sexy. The consummation between Sappho and Adore might be one of the most beautiful sex scenes, if not the most, I’ve ever seen on theatre stage.

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In the final jig, Sappho reiterates lesbian visibility by the narrator waving both the lesbian and rainbow flags. However, this does not justify its overall cultural appropriation. In this production, “Sappho” seems to be ascribed new meanings beyond the icon of lesbian, but sadly, she cannot avoid her fate of becoming another hollowed symbol, ready for contemporary political appropriation, which indicates weak relevancy to the richness and complexity of her own specific lesbian story, in her own specific civilisation.