Oresteia

by Aeschylus in a new version created by Robert Icke

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 27 June 2015

'Oresteia', directed by Robert Icke and designed by Hildegard Bechtler, features Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, Angus Wright as Agamemnon (and Aegisthus), Luke Thompson as Orestes and Jessica Brown Findlay as Elektra. It is the first in a series of Greek plays at the Almeida in 2015.

The 'new version' is definitely a 'version' and not merely a translation of the Greek text. The original trilogy ('Agamemnon', 'Choephori' or 'Libation Bearers', and 'Eumenides' or 'Kindly Ones') has in effect been turned into a tetralogy by dramatising an incident mentioned in 'Agamemnon' as a fully-fledged action in its own right. Looked at another way, Euripides's play 'Iphigenia at Aulis' has been adapted into an extended prologue to Aeschylus's trilogy.

The effect of this decision is to focus the attention ever more powerfully on the story of the family of Agamemnon and his son Orestes as a series of catastrophic inter-generational encounters. Agamemnon is forced by circumstances (or convinces himself that he is forced by them) to kill his daughter Iphigenia; Klytemnestra avenges her daughter's death by killing her husband; and Orestes avenges his father's death by killing his mother. What is to be done with Orestes, both victim and murderer? Should he, as one character urges, kill himself to avenge his mother's death?

Such a stark summary of brutal facts perhaps conveys the impression that the play is far removed from 'ordinary' experience. On the contrary, what we witness is an intensification of all too plausible domestic tensions and unpalatable political decision-making. Furthermore, Orestes is given more than usual prominence, since the presentation of the whole series of murders is gradually revealed to be a forensic examination of his memory of events, hovering between a sort of talking cure to recover and face trauma, and the process of the actual trial before the court convened in 'Eumenides', the final Aeschylus play. His desperate plea as the verdict is being considered that 'this is us! this is us!' forcibly confronts us, the audience, with our own potential guilt, or with the likelihood that circumstances will trap us against the best of our intentions.

As a theatrical experience, this is gripping and gruelling stuff. For nearly four hours, with two shorter-than-usual intervals and a brief three minute pause, we are faced with a series of appalling encounters leading to the most impossible impasse, all presented with pitiless clarity. 

The stage is bare except for a rather clinical long table and some matching benches, with a set of screens concealing - or with backlighting, revealing - an interior part of the house containing a large bath. At the beginning, the ritual of family life is established with the elaborate laying out of a tablecloth preparatory to a family dinner - with the teenage Elektra arriving late in a typical adolescent gesture - and this procedure is repeated at various stages throughout the evening as an ever more hollow claim to domesticity. But at this table Agamemnon sits with his young daughter Iphigenia on his lap, the media filming the scene for public consumption, while a kindly attendant feeds her the poisons whose 'humane' killing effects have been clinically described beforehand - a scene more horrible than any of the graphic butchery which follows in later acts.

Indeed the opening act, the Iphigenia story, affects the balance of the whole piece in surprising ways. It is a magnificent depiction of a powerful couple, charged with attraction to each other and devotion to their young children, but nonetheless volatile and easily able to frighten the youngsters with arbitrary pronouncements or to fob them off with unsatisfactory explanations. There is a wonderful dismissal of Iphigenia's sudden realisation that eating meat means killing animals, redolent of all 'mother knows best' statements that children find so infuriating.

In all this Lia Williams and Angus Wright are utterly convincing, and Wright's terror and dismay at what he feels he must do is painful to watch. This does not make his eventual steely determination to go through with the murder in any way excusable, but it renders his argument with his wife, which explodes into physical violence tinged with erotic tension, completely believable. In the meantime her support of her husband in both a political and domestic context is of course shattered, and Lia Williams makes it wonderfully clear by the slightest inflections that her support has always been a prudential decision taken with an awareness and only provisional acceptance of the need to compromise in personal relationships.

These swirling family dynamics, fatally entangled with Agamemnon's need to prosecute a war (never explicitly mentioned as the Trojan War in this version), and the prophecy that he must take his own child's life before his troops can even hope to start the offensive, is completely compelling. However, it does weaken the thrust of the second act, which is the adaptation of the original 'Agamemnon' play. In the first act, we have seen the adult Orestes watching the playing out of events that he was too young really to understand; now in his own person (Luke Thompson) he questions his mother about her knowledge that the war has ended, giving rise to an ingenious take on the famous speech about the beacon flares which have informed Klytemnestra of events before the human messengers have arrived.

Klyemnestra's media interview, and Agamemnon's subdued and uneasy demeanour on returning, can only be interpreted by us in relation to the horrible crisis of the child murder, inevitably drawing attention away from the two competing styles of arrogance which precipitate the deadly outcome of the play: Agamemnon's insulting presentation of Cassandra as war booty, and Klytemnestra's incitement to his hubris in convincing him to walk on a scarlet carpet (there is not even a physical carpet to break the starkness of the set). Gone completely is the extended confrontation between Klytemnestra and Cassandra. Instead, Elektra makes overtures to the foreigner,and the whole business of Cassandra speaking the truth but never being believed is resolved in a quite brilliant stroke whereby she speaks passionately - but incomprehensibly - in Greek.

In the adaptations of 'Choephori' and 'Eumenides' Orestes is fully active, and the drive to enable him to recover his memories of what he himself did is both more urgent and more resisted. This too alters the emphasis of the original trilogy, by focussing on personal trauma rather than on notions of honour and vengeance. The prominence given to Orestes detracts from the character of Elektra, who, though she remains important as a conduit of grief and resentment, is no longer the driving force. (The character is in any case less the focus in Aeschylus than in Sophocles or Euripides.) But the startling resolution of the notorious recognition scene, already parodied almost within Aeschylus's own lifetime, is to propose that Elektra is not a real character at all, but just a projection in Orestes's mind which is fragmenting under stress.

Clearly this is all a reflection on (or even a refraction of) the original masterpiece. Does it work? Are these shifts of emphasis justified? In its own terms, the version is powerful and provocative, excellently served by the cast and the design team. The production held the concentrated attention of the audience throughout its length. The invitation to see ourselves in the developing struggle inevitably is presented as a matter of psychological rather than political awareness, which is, I suspect, a diminishment of sorts, though still very apt. But it is strange that the most powerful moments of the drama are those taken from the prologue story - thus not from Aeschylus at all - despite the presence of the two great murders of Agamemnon by Klytemnestra, and of Klytemnestra by Orestes. Perhaps by the time we encounter them we are already inured to the shocks.