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Using video cameras and digital clocks and featuring moody
teenagers, slick lawyers and evasive politicians, Robert Icke's
nearly four-hour long version of the tragic trilogy seems to be
anchored in our own time, not in some mythic Greek past.
And that, says Rupert Goold, artistic director at London's
Almeida Theater where the "Oresteia" has just opened and will
play until July 18, is precisely the point.
"We believe that the work we present must be alive and resonant,
as far away as possible from being dusty cultural heritage," he
said.
By interpreting the "Oresteia" in ways accessible to a modern
audience, he said, they are just following the example of
Aeschylus himself who reworked myths already old and hoary in
his own time to pose big questions about society and family,
religion and politics, justice and revenge.
("Oresteia") is the original family drama to which all
subsequent family dramas can trace back their frameworks and
rhythms ... It's big, bloody and essential," Goold said.
First performed in 458 BCE, the "Oresteia" has a bloody plot:
father kills daughter, mother kills father, son kills mother, is
chased by furies and put on trial. Finally, when the jury is
split, son escapes death thanks to the casting vote of the
judge, the goddess Athene, who breaks the cycle of revenge.
Although this production retains plentiful allusions to the
ancient world of gods and portents - including a dream in which
two eagles tear apart a pregnant hare - the characterization and
the set, with a family dining table as its centerpiece, are
intended to convey a strong sense of everyday familiarity.
"THE CHILD IS THE PRICE"
At the start, a happy family, including child actors, admiringly
watch the father Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greeks in
the Trojan War, being interviewed by a TV journalist about
leadership, religion and war.
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Agamemnon, his image beamed on television screens, speaks of the
need for the Greeks to strike first before their enemy can attack,
in language that recalls the arguments used by Western leaders in
favor of a "preventative war" against Iraq in 2003.
Ever the politician, Agamemnon argues that the end justifies the
means, even if his own daughter Iphigenia must be sacrificed, in a
chillingly clinical scene involving lethal drugs, to appease the
gods and buy social order and eventual victory in war. "The child is
the price," he declares.
His wife Clytemnestra, in a harrowing performance from Lia Williams,
becomes a furious instrument of revenge for Iphigenia's death,
striking her stomach and screaming: "This is my child, part of my
body".
Orestes, the indecisive son constantly quizzed by a shrink, is
finally goaded by his sister Electra into slaying their mother and
her lover Aegisthus.
In an unusual dramatic twist, the same actor, Angus Wright, plays
both Agamemnon, the father Orestes reveres, and Aegisthus.
In the final act, the theater becomes a courtroom and the audience a
jury, though we also realize there are widely differing versions of
what has been played out.
As the lights dim, Orestes - cleared of the charges against him but
still in torment - asks repeatedly "What do I do?"
There is no answer, which is why the tragedy is fated to be played
over and over again.
(Gareth Jones is a Senior Editor in Charge for Reuters in London.
The views expressed are his own.)
(Reporting by Gareth Jones; Editing by Michael Roddy and Tom
Heneghan)
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