Dame Sybil Thorndike

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Vanity Fair October 1934

Before Vanessa Redgrave, before Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Sybil Thorndike, the Fabian feminist pacifist, set the stage for activist actors. The woman who created George Bernard Shaw's revolutionary Saint Joan and Emlyn Williams's liberating Miss Moffat became England's most topical tragedienne as the tormented queen Hecuba in a 1919 Old Vic production of Euripides's The Trojan Women. London audiences, still reeling from W.W. I, were stunned as she wailed to fallen Troy, "Would you be wise, you cities, fly from war." After that, striking drama's most relevant notes—particularly in the Greek tragedies—became a passion for Thorndike. Ariane Mnouchkine, the iconoclastic French stage director, also knows the power of the classics. Her company, the Theatre du Soleil, bears Greek gifts to a rare foreign appearance in Montreal this month— and is planning its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—with a monumental production of Les Atrides. The four-play cycle of Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis and Aeschylus's "Oresteia" trilogy is devoted to the perilous House of Atreus—that most troubled of all royal families.