After Robert Icke’s free adaptation of Aeschylus’s great trilogy, which has moved from the Almeida into the West End, Rory Mullarkey now offers a concise, three-hour version that makes a good impression on first hearing. The verse rhythms are fluid and flexible, allowing for passages of lyric song, and the language is pithy and vivid: I shan’t soon forget Clytemnestra’s dismissal of the hated Cassandra as “this sour-faced slut who sucked the sailors raw”.
I have more mixed feelings about Adele Thomas’s production. It has vigour and momentum, but it never settles on a consistent approach to the trilogy. The Chorus, for instance, are modern figures with trilbies and brollies, while Agamemnon and the Herald seem to have stepped out of classical antiquity, and Clytemnestra appears in a patterned, full-length frock that might have been designed by Bridget Riley.
But it’s not simply a matter of the costuming. The production style oscillates between contemporary naturalism and stylised formality and in the difficult final play it climaxes in a kind of high camp. The Furies resemble nightclubbing goths and the establishment of democracy is marked by the parading of a giant penis of a kind we haven’t seen since Peter Brook’s 1968 production of Seneca’s Oedipus.
For all its oddities, the production tells the basic story, incorporates Mira Calix’s music into the action and contains some striking performances. Katy Stephens is a powerful Clytemnestra who even manages to invest her greeting to the returning Agamemnon (“He’s back now. Home now”) with a waspish irony. She is the dynamic centre of the show, but there is good work from Joel MacCormack as a driven Orestes, George Irving as an arrogantly naive Agamemnon and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as a singing, dancing Cassandra. I was less moved than by the Icke adaptation. But at least the evening shows how “justice” – the word that resounds through Mullarkey’s text like a drumbeat – easily transmutes into blood-soaked revenge.
• At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 16 October. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
