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.
