The death penalty was meted out last month on someone whose name is mostly unknown to the public, save for a press release and foreign media coverage. His name is Datchinamurthy Kataiah, 39 convicted and sentence to death in 2015 under the The Misuse of Drugs Act provides for the death penalty. He was arrested in 2011 for drug trafficking, when he was 26.

“Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, such as the trafficking of significant quantities of drugs which cause very serious harm, not just to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society.”

At the heart of Iphigénie En Tauride is an execution. A sacred one, endorsed by law, decreed by a ‘barbaric’ King who fears his Death, and therefore chaos for his people. His faith in an oracle predicting that his regicide will be conducted by a male foreigner is exacted by duty.

Iphigénie performs her duty with reluctance but her hands are stained, and her memory littered by remnants of the many that she has had to kill. The region has been much devastated by the Trojan War, and there are many refugees, like her brother. They are haunted by deeds they have done or were done to them. The refugee women, now fellow priestesses, are likely widowed survivors, spared from from the law only because they are not men.

In imagining this work for Singapore, we have put the far reaching shadow of death front and center – these are “sacred gallows”. TK felt that the hangman’s noose should always will be seen, looming. I agree. We have to look it in the eye. We have to see the bodies.

Through this opera, I offer you a container through Iphigénie’s story, as she is tested in Faith and Fear. I offer you a moment to sit with sole survivors of a war-torn race; to listen to the paeans offered by a community to dead families; to visit the desperate dream of a sibling; a family member of an executed.

Fear and Faith are very bedfellows, a distinguishing line not much stronger than one’s perspective. I am God-fearing, law-abiding, so daily, I look: Can I tell the difference? I call to Diana for clemency, grace, deliverance. But she only comes in a fevered dream, weighted by the prayers of those killed, a what-if, an if-only. In this country that we have constructed by law and logic, there is no space for Diana.

But…what if…if only?

“Nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except Pain” The Oresteia

“They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders.”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia

Early Treatment and Subsequent Evolution

Context: a modern society where the death penalty exists. Setting: Sleep, a lucid dream state. Sacred gallows.

Overture: the execution of Orestes is seen (or heard, the sound of the gallows mechanism). This is the reality. Iphigenie’s mind is thus fractured from the trauma of repeated executions – the final one of her brother. The opera begins. 

The opera opens as a nightmare and operates purely within a sister’s desperate despair for the “if-only”.

The chorus (bigger then life masks?) plays as a figment of her conscience, her imagination, her psychotic break, the body politic and the forces that press her hand. Thoas representing Law and Country.

Act 4 is the finale of the dream sequence. The “if-only” that Iphigenie plays out in her heart, in her mind – where Diana comes to absolve her judicial responsibility and save her brother.

(Image: Diana as formless face coming out of the structure – a break in the structures that construct this world)

While the final Chorus sings joyously of Diana’s deliverance, the moment is unnaturally spirited, joyous to the point of grotesque, impossible. 

We see a processional chorus of those previously executed celebrating his deliverance. 

But Orestes is never brought down from the gallows. In a state of lucid dreaming, Iphegenie knows. 

There is no Diana to absolve. Thoas, the law, forces Iphigenie’s hand, Orestes has been executed, by Iphigenie.

With the final notes of the Chorus sung, we hear the click of the trap door mechanism three times. We see the body of Orestes hanging/hung, like in the opening.

As a society that judges with the death penalty, there is no hand of God to save us all. “Deliver us from evil”  – we are that evil.