Review: Razing Hypatia
Aug. 23rd, 2009 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenIf you’re in Melbourne and have the time, I cannot recommend strongly enough you go see Razing Hypatia.
Jane Montgomery, who’s written and stars in the play, was my classics lecturer for pretty much all my units, so I’m already a big fan, but this… damn, it just blew me away. She is absolutely fantastic, switching between theme and place and concept perfectly, weaving together all the elements into a painful but fantastic whole.
Hypatia and her death is, of course, such an interesting and horrifying story, and Jane does full justice to every aspect of the story and its interpretation, while weaving in the story of a modern woman viewing her own failures through the context of Hypatia.
There’s so much to discuss in Hypatia, and Jane could well have written an entire play about just one of the ideas raised here – the contrast between the intellectual sterility of her mathematics and the visceral horror of her death, her place as a woman in a male-dominated field and sexless image contrasted with the focus historians and artists have placed on her beauty, the transcendent atheist philosophy that she taught contrasting with the narrow-minded Christian fundamentalism that tortured and murdered her, her place as a martyr of science and how that has overshadowed her actual work.. I think it will take at least another day or so before I’m coherent enough to really discuss all the ideas raised here...
One minor warning – the descriptions of Hypatia’s torture and death were enough to give me nightmares. It is not for the faint of heart. It was not Jane’s portrayal of a woman in indescribable agony – superb as it was – that stuck with me, so much as her final, cold and precise description of just what is involved in being flayed to death and how long it could take to die from it. As I understand it, it was hearing such a description that inspired her to write the play, and it’s certainly something that’s hard to forget.
Seriously, if you have the chance, go and see it. It is a wonderful performance.
Jane Montgomery, who’s written and stars in the play, was my classics lecturer for pretty much all my units, so I’m already a big fan, but this… damn, it just blew me away. She is absolutely fantastic, switching between theme and place and concept perfectly, weaving together all the elements into a painful but fantastic whole.
Hypatia and her death is, of course, such an interesting and horrifying story, and Jane does full justice to every aspect of the story and its interpretation, while weaving in the story of a modern woman viewing her own failures through the context of Hypatia.
There’s so much to discuss in Hypatia, and Jane could well have written an entire play about just one of the ideas raised here – the contrast between the intellectual sterility of her mathematics and the visceral horror of her death, her place as a woman in a male-dominated field and sexless image contrasted with the focus historians and artists have placed on her beauty, the transcendent atheist philosophy that she taught contrasting with the narrow-minded Christian fundamentalism that tortured and murdered her, her place as a martyr of science and how that has overshadowed her actual work.. I think it will take at least another day or so before I’m coherent enough to really discuss all the ideas raised here...
One minor warning – the descriptions of Hypatia’s torture and death were enough to give me nightmares. It is not for the faint of heart. It was not Jane’s portrayal of a woman in indescribable agony – superb as it was – that stuck with me, so much as her final, cold and precise description of just what is involved in being flayed to death and how long it could take to die from it. As I understand it, it was hearing such a description that inspired her to write the play, and it’s certainly something that’s hard to forget.
Seriously, if you have the chance, go and see it. It is a wonderful performance.
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on 2009-08-23 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-08-25 08:17 am (UTC)