Directed by Raz Golden
Featuring Amir Arison, Merritt Janson, Amir Malaklou, Sanjit De Silva, Shayvawn Webster, and more to be announced.
The tragic fall of the last Assyrian king and his decadent reign: a story of love, betrayal, and self-discovery as told by the most notorious of the Romantic poets
Produced in partnership with the Byron Society of America, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.
This event will premiere live in-person from the Sheen Center Loreto Theatre on Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 7:30 PM ET. The recording will be available at 7:30 PM ET on Friday, October 25 until 11:59 PM ET on Wednesday, October 30. Open Captions will be available at 7:30 PM ET on Saturday, October 26 until 11:59 PM ET on Wednesday, October 30.
THE CAST
ABOUT THE PLAY
Set in ancient Assyria in the 7th Century BCE, this historical tragedy is about how insurgency and popular revolt bring an empire to its end. But rather than tracking the actual revolution against the government, the drama focuses on a love story as well as the eccentric title character himself, the “last Assyrian emperor,” according to Byron’s sources. On the surface, King Sardanapalus stands out from his long line of royal ancestors. He prefers love and revelry to combat and military valor. Unlike Salamenes, the king’s confidant, head of the army, and dutiful brother to the queen, Sardanapalus is hedonistic, vain, and possibly queer. Described as “slothful” and labeled a “she-king,” he enjoys not only lavish banquets of great food and wine but also donning fine garments and accessories so that he can admire himself in the mirror. He also likes spending time with his lover and “favourite,” the enslaved Greek Myrrha, instead of queen Zarina, his wife and the mother to his children. Despite urgings from Salamenes and Myrrha, the king refuses to believe that two governors or “satraps,” Arbaces and Beleses, are staging a coup against the kingdom. Priding himself on being a pacifist sovereign, Sardanapalus has assumed that his many subjects – whose array of cultures have been subsumed under the “Assyrian” imperial umbrella – are pleased with his governing style; he cannot fathom that what he understands as “peace” might be interpreted elsewhere as idleness and “inaction.” In his words, he has been “misplaced” and would rather wear a “crown of flowers” in a land far away from his Mesopotamian homeland.
Byron’s historical source for his play was the ancient Greek historian, Diodorus, who described the ancient emperor of Assyria as an indolent and “effeminate” crossdresser and bisexual. While composing Sardanapalus, Byron also drew on a range of other sources, including the dramatic works of Seneca, John Dryden, William Shakespeare (especially his Antony and Cleopatra), Vittorio Alfieri (especially Mirra), and Franz Grillparzer. The play was published in 1821 alongside a historical tragedy, The Two Foscari, and Cain, a “mystery.” In the preface to this collection, Byron explicitly wrote that the dramas were not intended for stage production. Some critics have agreed with Byron that such a “closet drama”—to include other plays by Byron’s contemporaries such as William Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse, or Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound—is better kept to the page than stage because of its emphasis on high literary language rather than dramatic action. In fact, melodrama and pantomime were the most popular forms of stage drama in the early nineteenth century: spectacles like trained horses or elaborate set-pieces attracted contemporary audiences to the theater. While Byron did manage to have one of his plays, Marino Faliero (1821), staged during his lifetime at Drury Lane Theater in London, the performances unfortunately received extremely harsh reviews. Some critics have proposed that the inflammatory final gesture of Sardanapalus, which Byron conceived of during the Drury Lane fiasco, may have been influenced by the reports and reviews sent to him. Perhaps the last scene implies what Byron may have wanted to do to London’s theater culture.
Sardanapalus first opened, long after Byron’s death, at Drury Lane Theater in London on April 10, 1834, in a production by William Macready, which ran for twenty-three nights. The actor and theater manager, Charles Kean, revived the play in 1853 for a successful two seasons of ninety-three performances. It was not uncommon for these Victorian performances to limit the king’s “effeminate” manner and appearance; they cut the mirror scene and downplayed questions of gender identity by emphasizing the play’s representations of militaristic imperialism and governance. In 1990, Murray Biggs organized a production of the drama at Yale University. Tonight’s event at Red Bull is the second time that this theater company stages Sardanapalus and the first time it broadcasts it virtually across the globe; Red Bull’s first in-person performance of Byron’s play took place in 2012 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on 42nd Street in NYC.
Byron’s play inspired several works in other media. The famous French painter, Eugène Delacroix, produced a large painting, Le Mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-1828); it hangs today in the Louvre Museum in Paris right across from the very famous Delacroix painting, La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People, 1830). In the 1830s, the French composer Henri Berlioz produced La Mort de Sardanapale, a cantata that ultimately won him the Prix de Rome. In the 1840s, Franz Liszt produced Sardanapalo, an unfinished Italian opera based on Byron’s vision.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
There are many ways to read Sardanapalus as a drama à clef: as an embodiment of the life of its author and playwright, George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824), who was among the most famous writers of his age. We could understand Byron’s unparalleled celebrity status as anticipating the global fandom of stars like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Like Sardanapalus, Byron stood out. He was bisexual, disabled (born with a club foot), and a victim of sexual abuse as a child; he also struggled with excessive alcohol consumption and an eating disorder. He “awoke famous” following the 1812 publication of his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the literary romance that introduced the first notorious “Byronic hero” to the world. In April 1816, following a very public divorce and amid rumors of having committed acts of incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, Byron had to flee England. He spent the remaining eight years of his life as an exile in Switzerland, Italy, and Greece. Living near the most famous woman in Europe, Madame de Staël, and welcoming guests such as Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori, he turned his 1816 summer in Geneva into the stuff of legend. During those very dark and stormy months, he proposed a ghost story competition to all his companions – one that ultimately gave rise to Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus (1818), as well as John Poldori’s tale, The Vampyre, which, based in part on Byron, inspired the aristocratic vampire stories we recognize today in Hollywood.
While in Italy, Byron became profoundly interested in drama and wrote most of his plays between 1820-21. He composed Sardanapalus in Ravenna during the first months of 1821, while embroiled in his own love affair with Teresa Guiccioli, the wife of an extremely powerful and considerably older Italian nobleman, Count Alessandro Guiccioli. Teresa encouraged Byron to enhance the story of Sardanapalus with a gripping love plot. Toward the end of his life, Byron continued to sympathize with radical and revolutionary causes. He contemplated moving to Venezuela to support the Bolivarian uprisings against Spain; it is also highly probable that he based part of his major poem, Don Juan (pronounced “Don JOO-ahn”), on the life and travels of the Venezuelan celebrity exile, Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816). In Italy, Byron joined the Carbonari, a clandestine society that supported Italian nationalism. In 1823, he journeyed to Greece to support the national uprising against the Ottoman Turkish Empire. After catching a fever, Byron died in Messolonghi on April 19, 2024, and, to this day, is celebrated as a Greek national hero. Tonight’s performance thus commemorates his passing 200 years ago.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We have many persons and institutions to thank for supporting this special bicentenary occasion, including tonight’s in-person performance and the virtual recording made available across the world. Thank you, first and foremost, to the geniuses at Red Bull Theater, especially its artistic director, Jesse Berger, with whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of collaborating for many years. I am grateful to Amir Arison for reprising the eponymous role he performed brilliantly 12 years ago. Many thanks to our generous co-sponsors: the Byron Society of America (byronsociety.org), the Keats-Shelley Association of America (k-saa.org), and the Keats-Shelley House Museum in Rome (ksh.roma.it). We are also thankful to our individual donors, Jerome McGann (Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia) and George Krupp (Keats-Shelley Association of America). Enjoy the show!
- Omar F. Miranda | Associate Professor, University of San Francisco