In this Greek week where cinemas are rightly dominated by Sir Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, there is an equally compelling delve on stage with Aeschylus’s trilogy.
As with Nolan’s movie, there will be those who pick at where they see director Simon Stone’s adaptation has strayed from the original. The criticism makes more sense with the film, which is set in the ancient past. But with this play of three parts, where the timeline begins in pre-pandemic 2016 and ends in 2026, it is easier to play fast and loose.
So ignore any quibbles. This is as compelling an evening of theatre as you will find. When the plays – think of them as three acts – move away from Aeschylus they become their own gripping thing.
During the evening’s three and a half hours the two 15-minute intervals serve not so much as opportunities to relieve muscles and bladders as respite from the kind of tension that can make a person forget to breathe.
The set is a modern, minimalist mansion, all concrete and glass. As members of this wealthy family move through its rooms, the building revolves like a time machine, dropping us variously into the preludes and aftermaths of the killings that beget more killings.
Bluff Yorkshireman Christopher (for which read Agamemnon, the general who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for a fair wind) is an arms dealer. His is also the family patriarch whose notional authority is the butt of his daughter Alice’s (Rosie Sheehy) ruthless satire. His loving wife Monte, played by American actress Mary-Louise Parker, joins in. It is the day of Alice and her twin Isobel’s birthday. Champagne has been ordered but only Bollinger has been delivered. It won’t go to waste. Christopher will use it for cooking.
Embarrassingly, Isobel – a student at Cambridge – does not show up. She is part of a group who protests against her father’s company. It has sold equipment that helped Putin raze Grozny and Syria.
A revolve of the house and we are pitched into the bitter grief of Isobel’s death. Twist again and Monte’s plot to kill Christopher is in full sail, just as Clytemnestra’s killed Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s trilogy.
Stones’ version is a claustrophobic affair in which stable 21st-century lives unravel like the freewheeling unintended repercussions of a bloody Coen brothers’ thriller.
If I have a gripe it is that Stone inserts 21st-century moral argument into his updated version. His Orestes (Augie) has learnt atrocity from his time as British soldier in Afghanistan. He is apparently on the same colonialist continuum as the crusades, Dresden and Hiroshima, the last two mentioned but decontextualised from German and Japanese fascism in the way that only the British left can.
Still, the acting and the stagecraft are just too good to let this ruin things. Every time I see Rosie Sheehy I think she is giving the best performance you will find on stage. The same is true here.
The production is a fitting tribute to Nicholas Hytner who has sold the theatre he and Nick Starr founded nine years ago.
The Oresteia
Bridge Theatre
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.