Praise is due to Robert Icke for his boldness in freely adapting Aeschylus’s great trilogy, for the visual elan of his production and for some fine performances from a 10-strong cast. Yet Icke sometimes substitutes neurotic intensity for what a Greek professor once called “the formal calm that pervades Aeschylus and Greek tragedy”. The best sections in this four-act, 3hr 40-min-version are the beginning and the end.
Icke daringly extrapolates from an Aeschylean chorus the drama of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to prosecute a war. We not only get beautifully staged scenes around the fractious family dinner table, but find striking performances: Angus Wright memorably expresses the mental anguish of a divided leader, while Lia Williams is brilliant as a horrified Klytemnestra who pummels her belly as she cries: “This is my child – part of my body.” By placing so much stress on the initial child-murder, Icke also lends weight to the concluding act, in which Orestes is tried for killing Klytemnestra. The case for and against is presented in forensic detail, leaving Orestes technically exculpated – on the grounds that “we favour men in all things” – but haunted by moral guilt.
This is Aeschylus for the modern age, rightly leaving us to draw our own conclusions about the shaky premises on which political leaders go to war. But the framing device of having Orestes (a pensively troubled Luke Thompson) relive his actions to a shrink is sketchily pursued and, energetically though Jessica Brown Findlay embodies Elektra’s hunger to avenge Agamemnon’s death, the tension sags three-quarters of the way through.
Whatever cavils I may have, however, there is no denying the wit and ingenuity of Icke’s production. Hildegard Bechtler’s design and Natasha Chivers’s lighting yield astonishing, deep-focus images. Williams unforgettably conveys Klytemnestra’s visceral rage and artful duplicity, and the idea of having Wright play both Agamemnon and his wife’s lover, Aegisthus, expresses the circular futility of revenge. It’s a stirring production that whets the appetite for an Almeida season that, as Rupert Goold has said, aims to take the Greeks out of the Attic.
• At the Almeida, London, until 18 July. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
