We have had Robert Icke’s celebrated version of The Oresteia at the Almeida (transferring to Trafalgar Studios) and Blanche McIntyre’s revival of Ted Hughes’s translation comes to Manchester next month. But Rory Mullarkey’s adaptation of these three Aeschylus plays – Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides – at the Globe (an ideal venue for Ancient Greek drama) is undertaken with a spirit it would be hard to trump. It is visceral in every sense, including the most fiercely literal. At the end of the first play, Clytemnestra slaughters her husband in the bath, and presents his butchered body for inspection. At the end of the second, her son, Orestes, murders her in return and her body is presented in bloody symmetry.
Mullarkey has adapted Aeschylus in a way that never fudges, conceals or distances. Writing about atrocity, his translation is simple. There is no better line than this report: “They found the house dyed red.” Director Adele Thomas has a particular flair for ensemble work. Her chorus of modern-dress mourners are regular petitioners of Zeus, raise their folded umbrellas to him in quirky homage. Zeus is a key audience member and we (especially if sitting in the Globe’s galleries) might imagine ourselves his henchmen.
Katy Stephens as Clytemnestra is the stuff of nightmare, dressed in what looks like a Mary Quant black and white maxi-dress soon to turn scarlet. Her beautiful speaking voice makes her violent words all the more obscene. As Orestes, Joel MacCormack has the gift for making you believe every word, a perfectly pitched urgency. And Rosie Hilal as his sister, Electra, has a moving naturalness. Mira Calix’s music adds a melancholy dimension with clarinet, horn and saxophone.
By the end of the second play, two bloodbaths down and hoping for a cathartic finish, one is reeling. But the third play incompletely satisfies. It is in a different emotional register: jauntily moralising as it sets up history’s first murder trial. Athena, although charmingly played by Serbian Branka Katic, appears, in her blindingly gold dress, like a quiz-show hostess. The light relief does not relieve. And that includes the final, vulgar miscalculation of the huge golden phallus carried through the crowd. It trivialises what has gone before – as though someone had placed a silly hat on a dead man’s head.
• The Oresteia is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1, until 16 October
