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Fragments of the grandeur of Euripides’ tragedy shine through in this earnest but ill-conceived production. Turkish director Serdar Biliş jarringly interlaces the tale of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter during the Trojan War with reminiscences of contemporary family life and filmed testimonials about male cruelty or violence.
The former are bittersweet – some sad, some warm and fuzzy – and ostensibly drawn from the memories of the show’s three strong actors. The latter are from a series of unnamed women of different nationalities. They include tales of indifferent fathers and abusive husbands, horror stories of assassination or bombardment in Ukraine and Lebanon.
They come thick and fast, tonally uneven and shorn of context, projected onto the ruched curtain that dominates Mona Camille’s meaningless set, and onto blank canvases held up by the actors. The tale of a murdered son by an unidentified regime sits alongside a reference to the Hindu/Persian tradition of placing an egg under each wheel of a new car (to symbolize the crushing of evil spirits as one drives away – I had to look that up).
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The interviews therefore sit very uneasily with each other, with the ritualised emotion of the classical story and with the jokily “meta” overall tone. The sporadic deployment of pipe music and song by musician Kalia Lyraki feels similarly poorly thought through.
It begins with actor Simon Kunz stumbling on, apologising to us: it was his turn to pre-set the stage and he forgot. He fusses around, takes a phone call (apparently from his son, asking for money), and fills us in on the history of godly exploitation, caprice and jealousy that prompted Greece’s war on Troy. This last bit is, at least, useful.
Greek drama invented Catch-22 long before Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel. Every move of the gods places humanity in a recurring chain of no-win situations. In order to save his family’s honour Agamemnon is compelled to murder his beloved child. Thereby saving himself from his army’s anger – the sacrifice gives a wind to his becalmed ships - he makes a pitiless enemy of his wife Clytemnestra. Family atrocities resonate through the generations.
Part of the tragedy here is that there are glimpses of what the cast could do if they were just allowed to tell the story. The stentorian, mannered tone of the dialogue – adapted by Biliş from an English version by Stephen Sharkey – initially sounds overblown in this compact, bare space, but the three actors invest it with conviction.
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Donning a formal uniform jacket, Kunz sloughs off the role of the bumbling thesp to harden into the hawkish general faced with impossible decisions. Indra Ové is a harried, sometimes histrionic, but striking presence as Clytemnestra, her silk-sheathed poise deranged by grief and horror. As Iphigenia, Mithra Malek emerges from the audience - a potent, dark-eyed presence in a shaggy coat and linen slacks. Speaking with measured emphasis she passes from joy to despair to acceptance, weeping hot tears on the way.
Her core performance here is as arresting as the one she gave in the wildly different role of a Hispanic ex-con butcher in the Meat Kings (Inc) of Brooklyn Heights at the Park Theatre in November 2025. Why, then, does Biliş require her to drop character and talk about childhood abandonment issues? Or Kunz to chunter about seaside shrimping outings with his dad and brother? Or Ové to relate how her Trinidadian grandmother cooked the goat she’d been given as consolation for her parents’ divorce.
The actress is the daughter of British-Trinidadian film-maker Horace Ové, which makes me suspect that the “personal” stories are genuine. They add nothing to the central tale, though. And while the filmed interviews are undoubtedly legitimate, they represent a clumsy and unnecessary attempt to make Euripides relevant. Worse, their snippety, incomplete nature trivialises the experiences themselves. This is a well-intentioned mess.
Until 2 May, arcolatheatre.com.
