On Finding Ajax in Iraq

Extract

I never intended to write an adaptation of sophocles's ajax. I didn't think i'd ever be able to cope with the horror of that opening image—Ajax's crazed slaughter of animals and particularly his torture of them while he is in the grip of his delusion that he is killing and torturing the men he thinks have betrayed and shamed him: his generals, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Odysseus, the man he thinks unjustly won his rightful trophy, the armor of the dead Achilles. Though we don't see Ajax at his butchery in that first scene—we only hear him obscurely in the tent center stage—I've always found the image of what he is doing in there more abhorrent than any other brutality the Greek tragedians conjured.