Andromak

Andromak is a story about blindness: the blindness of love, hate and revenge. The source of this blindness is the Trojan War, the mother of all wars in Greek mythology, and fought for Helen, the most beautiful woman in all Greece. Of course this was not the real reason for the war. The war over Troy, which was probably situated in the northwest of what is now Turkey, was an economic war fought to gain control of the extremely important passage that connects the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and form the link between Europe and Asia. 

The most important source for the saga of Troy is Homer’s Ilias. It is the oldest preserved written work in the West. The Greeks read it as an historical, but poetic, tale. In their view the reality of this saga was more important than the historical reality.  

Whether the Trojan War, the tribal dispute between Greeks and Trojans, between Europe and Asia, took place or not, all the wars that have occurred since, copies of this prototypical war, were all the more real and as if in a mirror still provide us with indirect proof of the truth of the struggle for Troy. 

Peter and Luk Perceval based the text of Andromak on Racine’s Andromaque (1667), who in his turn was inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid. In the adaptation by Peter and Luk Perceval the tragedy is free of the verbosity and other conventions of Racine’s age. In the adaptation the social and literary harness has been replaced by a dangerous and extreme spatial constraint. As in the theatre of cruelty, language is reduced to the bare necessities and the main form of expression is that of the body.