In the week that Christopher Nolan’s starry Odyssey comes into cinemas, you couldn’t imagine a more different take on post-Trojan-War-fallout than this from one of theatre’s own great auteurs.
Simon Stone reaches some of the same conclusions as Robert Icke’s era-defining (and similarly bum-numbingly long) version at the Almeida in 2015 – humans bad, wars bad, revenge bad – but this stands on its own terms as Stone puts all the toys in his toybox to their best use. Yes, like many of his previous productions, the play happens in a glass cube, an opulent modernist mansion in miniature from Lizzie Clachan – concrete walls, chrome-edged recliners – lit from within by Nick Schlieper, turning each scene into a modern Gothic tableau.
Yes, he has played very loose with foundation text, returning to Greek drama after his patchier Phaedra in 2023, but in this case flensing the trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus that revolve around the house of Atreides, instigators of the Trojan War.
Stripped to bare bones and slickened to a bloody thriller, Stone’s adaptation homes in on the play as a cluster of family murders – matricide, suicide, a couple of other -icides – each one a stacked domino in a cascade of revenge that seems never to end.
Populating the cube are the very privileged, very troubled, very unlikeable Middleton family. Dad Christopher and brother Melville run a company that manufactures things they shouldn’t for people they shouldn’t. Mum Monty is arranging the 21st birthday party of twin daughters Isabel (fiery, pretty, mostly unseen) and Alice (boring, unhappier). There is also younger son Augustus plus cousin Jerome and his son Lorenzo…
We're thrown into the raucous bickering of their world, every other word a swear word in this ultra-modern script full of overlapping chatter, a brilliant profaning of an almost sacred text. Then, scything back and forth in time between 2016 and now, we slowly piece together the family’s unravelling.
Stone's stuffed some stunning stage talent into his cube. David Morrissey does what he does pre-eminently, i.e. gruff patriarch battling demons. It’s a joy to see Mary-Louise Parker bring her ironic half-smile to Monty, and even more so to watch her descent into grief and bitterness and finally a dead-eyed despair.
But it’s the younger generation that really astonish. Rosie Sheehy is a walking mood swing as Alice, with a Chelsea drawl and mile-a-minute monologues. Tom Glynn-Carney holds the latter two-thirds of this double-intervalled production together as increasingly unstable Augustus, brutalised by his family as much as by a tour in Afghanistan.
It is a powerful mapping of the new play onto the old one. Where Agamemnon and Menelaus were kings who started wars over a woman in the Aeschylus original, here they are arms dealers in thrall to money, never having to get their hands dirty.
Three-and-a-half hours whip by, crowned by a coup in the epilogue: suddenly Stone reminds us that all this juicy violence we’ve been enjoying as spectacle – bloody hand-prints on the pristine glass, Stanley knives shoved into guts – stands in for the scenes of brutality playing out in the world’s many war zones. That visceral thrill turns to queasy sucker punch. House Middleton becomes a metaphor for any race of people stuck in a cycle of retributive violence. No deus ex machinas here. It’s all too painfully human, a reminder that we’re the sowers of all this violence, and the reapers too.
