Camden Fringe: Lieve de Putter on giving Echo, Cassandra and Helen their voices

Why classicist Lieve de Putter went back to the original Greek and Latin for Camden Fringe’s ECHOES

Lieve de Putter is a classicist as well as an actor and writer. Her one-woman show ECHOES takes five women from Greek and Roman myth, Echo, Philomela, Cassandra, Arachne and Helen, all silenced or disbelieved in different ways, and sets them against a contemporary woman living through an ordinary day. It plays at the Etcetera Theatre as part of Camden Fringe on 26, 27 and 28 August, following earlier runs at the Bread and Roses Theatre and the Hen and Chickens.

What sets de Putter’s approach apart is that she works from the original Latin and Greek herself rather than relying on existing translations, a decision she talks about below with real specificity, down to individual words that earlier translators softened or changed. She talked me through where the show came from, why these five women rather than others, and what she hopes an audience with no classics background at all might take from it.

Red Bus: Echo, Philomela, Cassandra, Arachne and Helen are all quite different stories of women silenced. What made you choose this particular constellation, rather than, say, focusing on just one or two in depth?

Lieve de Putter: ECHOES is ultimately a show about the suppression of the female voice. I wanted to show how the female experience echoes through time, so I researched all the ways women are being silenced today (whether done preventatively by ourselves by altering the way we speak or restricting our breathing by wearing tight clothing; or imposed by society/the patriarchy (I recommend reading Patsy Rodenburg’s The Woman’s Voice)) and then tried to find myths that mirror those moments. I wanted to shed light on the complexity, and all the different aspects of this issue nowadays, and wouldn’t have been able to do so if I had just focussed on the stories of two ancient women.

Instead, the show follows a contemporary woman living through a day, and while she experiences life, ancient women keep erupting, wanting to be heard after having been silent for so long. Echo can only repeat words, Cassandra is always disbelieved, Philomela was raped and muted, Arachne shut up for exposing the gods, and Helen’s story has been owned and altered by men for the last 2700 years. They all show a different side of a very contemporary problem.

Red Bus: You are working from the original languages yourself rather than relying on existing translations. What does that let you do that an English translation alone would not?

Lieve de Putter: Latin and Greek are very poetic, playful and nuanced languages, and every time you translate a word, you have to make a decision that will leave some of the nuance out. One of the things I try to highlight in the show, is how much power lies with the one who tells the story. For centuries translators have changed words to suit their beliefs, called mouths “lips”, a body a “soft bosom” and rape “an intrigue”. Even though the original texts are also written by men, it feels like I can get much closer to the woman behind the text if I translate and adapt directly from the Latin or Greek.

Philomela’s myth was the easiest to adapt, as I could stay quite close to the original text: Ovid tells her story with great care and also gives us an incredible monologue from Philomela’s perspective, which of course I had to include.

For other women it was a different matter. For example for Cassandra I first read all the texts that mention her (first in translation, and then in Ancient Greek) and following those accounts in which she is always described as wild and crazy, tried to come up with her side of the story: being aware of how people see her, but including her own thoughts and feelings on the matter. Similarly I based Helen’s scene on an excerpt in the Iliad, in which a single sentence towards the end angered me so much I felt like she deserved to have that part of the story rewritten from her own perspective. Of course that way I also make the characters my own, just like the male translators did, but I feel like I can give them a different (and perhaps more authentic) voice based on lived female experiences.

I should add that I have included one poem by Sappho in the play which is an existing translation by Anne Carson (which I chose after having compared about 30 translations of the same poem by both men and women alongside the Ancient Greek). Sappho is not a character in the show, and the poem is recited, so I felt it was more suitable to read someone else’s words in this moment.

Red Bus: This started life as a one woman show blending spoken text, soundscape and movement. How did you decide which elements of these myths needed sound rather than words, or movement rather than either?

Lieve de Putter: The show blends all the elements together. I wrote a script that combines poetry with prose, and it needed elements to lift it off the page. I worked with a fantastic composer (Tattie Chater Davies, assisted by Emily Rae), who helped me develop the play in its early stages, and added soundscapes to support the stories of the women, so that we are transported into their worlds. I then needed to find different ways for those women to hold themselves, speak, and move through the world, so that’s where movement direction came in, with help from Roxana Munoz.

Red Bus: The show is billed as funny as well as thought provoking. Given how bleak some of these stories are (Philomela’s tongue, Cassandra’s disbelief), where does the humour come from, and were you ever worried it would sit awkwardly against the darker material?

Lieve de Putter: I believe a tragedy can only be felt if humour is contrasting it. I needed light-hearted moments so that the show didn’t turn into to an angry feminist lecture (nothing wrong with that, but not what I wanted my show to be). I want to show the humanity of these women, sometimes their ugliness, and definitely their awkwardness. They weren’t perfect, and neither are we: showing imperfections that are funny is what makes us relate to them.

Red Bus: What do you want someone who knows nothing about Greek mythology to walk away with, and is that different from what you’d want a classicist in the audience to take from it?

Lieve de Putter: I want the audience to feel a sense of awareness and responsibility for the way stories are told. To feel empowered by the idea of listening, and appreciate how important it is to be able to speak. Of course my inner classicist would also hope that the audience leaves wanting to know more of these ancient women (as I’m only giving them a taster) and of antiquity as a whole. After a previous run someone came up to me and said they would buy Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, which felt like a win to me!

LISTING DETAILS

ECHOES
Lieve de Putter
Etcetera Theatre, 265 Camden High Street, London NW1 7BU
26–28 August 2026, Camden Fringe
26 August, 9.00pm · 27 August, 7.00pm · 28 August, 9.00pm
Duration: 50 minutes
Tickets: £13.50
Suitable for ages 14 and over; contains references to sexual assault and explicit language
Tickets: Camden Fringe or Etcetera Theatre

Headshot photo credit: Boris Mitkov

Article photo credits: Peter No

ECHOES is one of the Red Bus picks for the Camden Fringe, find out about the others :