The Oresteia

by Simon Stone after Aeschylus and others

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 6 August 2026

Christopher Nolan's recent film The Odyssey has garnered critical acclaim, but also reservations (some of which are justifiable) about "authenticity" and interpretation. However, re-imagining classic myth and drama is inevitable as performance practices change and cultural and societal norms evolve. Hence for the Bridge Theatre Simon Stone has written and directed an Oresteia for our times, and it is a far more radical venture than anything attempted by Nolan. The essential outline of the traditional story - the catastrophic implosion of the family of Agamemnon - is here presented as the travails of an extremely modern and dysfunctional family: the time lines are given as running from 2016 to 2026. (Interestingly, the last time versions of The Oresteia were given professionally in London was in 2015: see my reviews of the Almeida and Globe productions.)

It may be useful to list the cast with their classic correspondences (a courtesy omitted by the program):

Marie-Louise Parker    -    Montie             (Clytemnestra)

David Morissey            -    Christopher     (Agamemnon)

Tom Glyn-Carney         -    Augie              (Orestes)

Rosie Sheehy               -   Alice                (Electra), and briefly her twin Isobel (Iphigenia)

Lloyd Hutchinson         -    Melville            (Menelaus), and also Lester a police inspector

John Macmillan            -   Jerome             (Aegisthus)

Archie Madekwe          -    Lorenzo           (presumably Pylades, imagined as Jerome's son)  

Alyth Ross                    -    Jenny and Letitia

Rakhee Thakrar           -    Chandra           (Cassandra)

Even the Almeida's modern-placed production used the familiar names and entangled the familial disasters with statecraft, but Stone's adaptation eschews the public sphere almost entirely by placing the Middleton family at one remove from political power. The brothers Christopher and Melville run an arms company which is inevitably supplying weapons to unsavoury states, but Christopher's business woes are more personal in that he has been embezzling company funds. Isobel, the rebellious but indulged child, has fallen in with protesters, while Alice, more socially awkward, remains at home with Augie.

Domestic tensions are already running high in 2016 as the family prepares for the twins' twenty-first birthday celebrations, and over the succeeding decade the cycle of vengeful murders plays out, leaving the hapless Augie in a frenzied and traumatised state: in the absence of the gods and the turning away from civic involvement there is no place for the healing of his mental state by the establishment of communal judgement such as is presented in the final play by Aeschylus. Rather, Augie is apparently sectioned and still damagingly haunted by his past actions, in a manic state perhaps inspired by the character's predicament in Euripides's play Orestes.

The Almeida's production focussed intensely in its first act on the sacrifice of Iphigenia, an episode only referred to in Aeschylus, partly no doubt to bring the full horror of that episode to the minds of an audience which may no longer have been familiar with the tale. At the Bridge the first act shows the tensions in the family at the point when Isobel is still alive, but not present, but there is an increasing sense that a disaster is waiting to happen, since so much family discord cannot possibly be dissipated. As the years pass we are witnesses of the later developments (ie, the murders), though the events are not presented in chronological order. There is an element of withholding information for dramatic effect which runs the risk of turning the whole affair into a thriller. In the most extreme case we hear of Isobel's death and its traumatic effect on her surviving relatives long before we actually witness its circumstances, and it is not clear that what we see can really account for all that has followed.

Lizzie Clachan provides an extraordinary set - a series of rooms in the Middleton's Kentish house on two levels, all enclosed by vast glass windows to create a huge box, rotating slowly as needed to reveal the different rooms. It's a visual style used in previous productions by Stone (I have seen his Yerma and Phaedra), and it perfectly reflects the suffocating claustrophobia in modern family life. But it has its costs. Because of the enclosed space the actors are all miked, and this leads to an unfortunate flatness of tone and occasional jarring noises if two people are too close to one another (for instance, when hugging - a rare event in this appalling family). Another signature feature of Stone's direction, the tendency for many characters to speak at once, makes it even harder to concentrate on what is actually being said when everything is flattened electronically. While it might be claimed that this reflects the realities of social life when no-one is particularly interested in what anyone else is saying, it is an extremely disconcerting experience when witnessed on stage where one expects cues to focus one's attention. (This was also a problem with Phaedra only slightly mitigated here by being used more sparingly).

Overall, after the disconcerting start, the production became more gripping as it settled into developing its plot rather than just introducing us rather bewilderingly to the characters. The cast was excellent, with a powerhouse performance by Marie-Louise Parker as Montie matched by David Morissey's already somewhat crushed Christopher and Tom Glynn-Carney's increasingly deranged Augie. Rosie Sheehy's Alice was an extraordinary study in social awkwardness and entirely credible resentment at being the non-favoured twin, reflecting Electra's degraded position in her mother's household after her father's death. There were cunning redeployments of Aeschylean themes and motifs: for example, Clytemnestra's blasphemous invitation to Agamemnon to walk on a purple carpet (which he finally agrees to) is transmuted to Montie's insistence that Christopher should eat some biscuits, wheedling in the face of his firm refusal since he is on a wellness diet. Providentially only Chandra, the Cassandra figure, eats the biscuits, which are poisoned, though they do not kill her. In the maelstrom of recrimination and revenge there was considerable scope for extremely mordant humour, an unexpected byproduct of the "relatable" setting. The character of Letitia (Augie's fiancée, not directly related to a classical forebear) was a fountain of modern entitlement.

I am increasingly unsure that the disrupted chronology, which required projected messages to inform us in which year various scenes belonged, really did the play any favours (a view shared by others with me). Sometimes these scenes looked as if they were flashbacks, and sometimes not, which added to the destabilising effect; it left Augie's final predicament unresolved, with Isobel's fate revealed as the last major scene even though it was almost the first thing to have happened. A dramatic ending when it could have been a dramatic beginning, it looked close to cheating. The material could certainly support a more straightforward presentation as its full power is not really dependant on cliffhangers.

It is exciting to see what directors and actors make of material that in its classic form is nearly 2500 years old; but for modernising I preferred the version presented by the Almeida.

 

Age of Rage

after Euripides and Aeschylus

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 8 May2022

Gerard Koolschijn and Ivo van Hove have devised an epic retelling of the misfortunes of the House of Atreus and the depredations of the Trojan War based on several plays by Euripides and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Van Hove's usual collaborator Jan Versweyveld designed the production, a bare stage with scaffolding at either side for percussion instrumentalists, an area behind a huge mesh screen at the back, apparently the site of nefarious goings-on, and a gangway above allowing for various bodies to be winched out of sight.

It is not, of course, a happy story; indeed it descends into ever more revolting brutality.

As the audience filed in a complex family tree was being projected onto the mesh screen showing the relationships between the Greek characters, many of whom had Zeus as a forebear. The disasters befalling the house of Atreus span many generations, including two occasions when children were murdered and served in feasts to unsuspecting dinner guests. But this is all background: the particular 'age of rage' that we are to witness really begins with the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia, required by the goddess Artemis before she will allow favourable winds so that the Greek fleet (the 'thousand ships') can sail to Troy. The first major action of the play is thus a recasting of Euripides's Iphigeneia in Aulis. 

We were spared a genealogy of the Trojans since they appear only as victims and potential slaves, mainly women apart from the already murdered Polydorus and the hapless boy Astyanax thrown from the walls to his death. These episodes are taken from Hecuba and The Women of Troy, two more plays by Euripides, though the tragic figure of Andromache, the widow of the Trojan prince Hector and mother of Astyanax, was not mentioned. The sacrifice of another girl, Hecuba's youngest daughter Polyxena, to placate the soul of Achilles was a chilling parallel to the initiating obscenity of Iphigeneia's death, underscored here by having both parts played by the same actress (she also represented the dead Trojan boys).

Aeschylus's Agamemnon provided the source for the next scenes in which the general and king is killed by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy. He is accompanied by the hapless Cassandra who can foresee her fate but persuade no-one to believe her, while the queen is abetted by her husband's cousin Aegisthus, eager to pursue his own part in the family feud in order to regain power in Mycenae.

In the second half of the play we return to Euripides (his Orestes and Electra) as a source for the unedifying story of the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra buckling under the strain of needing to avenge their father's death at the cost of killing their mother. The gruesome task achieved, Orestes and Electra become unhinged in guilt and embark on further atrocities until providentially stopped by the intervention of Apollo. The less sensational and more profound version of this part of the story devised by Aeschylus does not really suit the message of Age of Rage that violence leads to ever more violence, and that state-sanctioned violence in one generaton too easily permits personal savagery in the next to go unchecked.

There is a huge amount of sheer narrative to take on board here; I am familiar with the original plays and with other literature both classical and modern dealing with these stories, so I found it easy enough to keep track, but I wonder how easy it was for someone new to the tale. The production had enormous energy, with pulsating music and frenetic dancing at climactic points, and gentler percussive effects building tension during the lengthy expositions. Many of the male actors took several parts by necessity, but the powerful doublings were of Ilke Paddenbourg as the female victims noted above, and of Chris Nietvelt as Clytemnestra and Helen (who were sisters).

There is a formal difficulty in adapting Greek tragedy to the modern stage, which here was largely solved by stripping back the choric odes in order to concentrate on the narrative, while indicating the ritual aspects of performance by the use of music and dance, and by often having almost mute witnesses on stage who occasionally contributed to the dialogue. But there is a tonal difficulty as well in trying to yoke Aeschylus and Euripides together in a single production. These are two playwrights who used the familiar myths and legends to very different dramatic ends, and the peculiar power of the Agamemnon is diminished by its being too closely linked to the Iphigeneia story even though it is entirely plausible to do so in a panoramic telling of the family history. 

The two explicit interventions by deities were the least convincing episodes. In the first, Iphigeneia is said to be miraculously replaced by a hind at the last moment before her sacrifice. This allows for the later story in which she is a priestess in Taurus (on the Black Sea), but renders less effective her sacrifice as an explanation of Clytemnestra's hostility to Agamemnon: though we are told of this divine intervention no-one on stage can take any comfort from it or even have any knowledge of it.

At the end of the play Apollo appears in order to stop Orestes and Electra in their tracks, promising that Orestes will find judicial vindication and perhaps a measure of personal peace in Athens (he says nothing to comfort Electra). Here, Apollo was just another young man on the stage, and there was no attempt to invest his words with any divine authority. Consequently his appearance raised a few unfortunate giggles in the audience, and his intervention seemed merely perfunctory. (It is often proposed that Euripides used the deus ex machina convention ironically, but this was not the way to bring an Age of Rage to a convincing conclusion.)

The performance was given in Dutch by members of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, with English surtitles: only a minor inconvenience as far as understanding was concerned, but perhaps vocal nuance was inevitably a casualty in a production lasting nearly four hours.

The Oresteia

by Aeschylus adapted by Rory Mullarkey

seen at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on 1 October 2015

The second major production of the Oresteia in London this year is directed by Adele Thomas and designed by Hannah Clark, with George Irving as Agamemnon, Katy Stephens as Clytemnestra, Joel MacCormack as Orestes and Rosie Hilal as Electra, and also Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Cassandra, Dennis Herdman as the Herald, Branka Katic as Athena, Trevor Fox as Aegisthus and Petra Massey as Cilissa (Orestes' nurse).

Merely providing a more extensive cast list shows that the style of this version is quite different from that produced at the Almeida Theatre. It is more clearly 'faithful' to the original trilogy by Aeschylus, in that the three parts presented to us are clearly 'Agamemnon',  'Choephori' and 'Eumenides', and the secondary group of characters therefore has more immediate impact. The story of Iphigenia is related by the chorus near the beginning of 'Agamemnon' but not explicitly dramatised, and this certainly redresses the balance of the opening play.

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.