Here is a space for Greek tragedy. Darkness is contoured by beams of light. A seeming-wall suddenly shivers like grass in a breeze; characters slip through its slivers into shadows; sudden illumination reveals murdered bodies, the person of a god. This is essentialised place: a somewhere that is nowhere and yet everywhere. On its stark ground, human figures flare evanescent: they live and die, but earth and light endure. Director Blanche McIntyre, with designers Laura Hopkins (set and costumes) and Lee Curran (lighting), here creates high-impact images for Ted Hughes’s version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (further adapted by McIntyre).
When it comes to the action, though, the production becomes less assured. As McIntyre points out in the programme, it is not naturalistic. King Agamemnon, home victorious from Troy, is murdered by Queen Clytemnestra because he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, before he left, to assure his army’s safe voyage.
Clytemnestra is backed by her lover, Aegisthus, because Agamemnon’s father had tricked Aegisthus’s father into eating two of his own sons. Orestes, encouraged by his sister, Electra, avenges his father by killing his mother and Aegisthus. Pursued by Furies for this act of matricide, Orestes flies to Athens and the shrine of Apollo. Here, the gods, whose dictates are behind so many character decisions thus far, will decide his fate. But they don’t: the goddess Athene hands judgment over to a jury of citizens.
Having set up a potent, mythic space, McIntyre locates the characters firmly in a contemporary-costumed present. The quality of the acting is good, but the style is at odds with the setting. With the exception of Clytemnestra (Lyndsey Marshal, powerfully epic) and Electra (played cross-gender by Gary Shelford, who is also Agamemnon and Apollo), characters’ stances are fidgety, their gestures everyday. Chorus members (separately men and women) look and behave like individuals but declaim long speeches in one collective voice. Occasionally the time clash becomes bathetic - Simon Trinder’s fraught Orestes is hounded by Furies looking like teenage goths. McIntyre’s linking of ancient and modern through emphasis on citizenship is interesting, but doesn’t meet the scale of the drama.
