{"id":1073,"date":"2015-06-18T13:44:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T13:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2015-06-18T13:44:22","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T13:44:22","slug":"too-much-greek-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2015\/06\/too-much-greek-love.html","title":{"rendered":"Too Much Greek Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Angus<\/a>

Angus Wright and Jessica Brown Findlay by Manuel Harlan<\/p><\/div>\n

In three hours and forty minutes precisely, Robert Icke\u2019s new version of Aeschylus\u2019 three tragedies that constitute the Oresteia, unfolds on the stage of the Almeida Theatre in North London. The \u201cprecisely\u201d is important, because Icke has also directed the highly compressed production, and he plays on our own sense of time and urgency. Digital clocks tell the time \u2013 to the minute \u2013 of the deaths of the various characters, and we, the audience, are herded into the auditorium by ushers, aided in their task by time-telling boards in the foyer. We are admonished to be in our seats in good time, or else be locked out. This of course creates a little anxiety in the spectators. I wonder if this is not analogous to the experience of a 5th century BCE Athenian theatre-goer, for whom these tragedies provided (says Aristotle) a catharsis \u2013 we know that the audience was thought to experience emotions of pity and terror that needed to be purged? Perhaps a nerve-wracked 21st century audience is a near equivalent.<\/p>\n

\tIcke has taken a good deal of liberty with the texts, but it seems to me that he has been as successful in updating Aeschylus as he has, as director, in setting the trilogy of plays in the present time. Behind the bare stage designer Hildegard Bechtel arranges sinister sliding panels, some of which conceal Agamemnon\u2019s fatal bath, and Natasha Chivers\u2019 creepy lighting and a camera crew with CCTV do the rest. <\/p>\n

\tIcke departs from Aeschylus by staging the killing of Iphigenia by her father, which in the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon is recounted as a backstory by the chorus. It\u2019s a 21st century, chilling, drinking the Kool-Aid scene, which makes it akin to putting a beloved pet to sleep, a hard-to-forget horror but, if anything, underplayed, not sensationalised. He treats the arguments of the plays weightily and seriously, without simplification. How do you put a stop to revenge killings? Why heed the order of a god to kill anyone? If the god wants someone dead, says Klytemnestra, why doesn\u2019t he just send an illness and take the life himself? The play questions Utilitarianism: can even the highest end justify these means? Is it ever right to kill an innocent person in cold blood, even to assure victory in a war? Can a court overcome its inherent masculine bias when Orestes is tried for matricide? <\/p>\n

\tOrestes gets off the charge because of the casting vote of the god. There\u2019s no catharsis, just a lot of hard, puzzling, unanswered questions.<\/p>\n

\tThough the programme democratically does not identify the roles played by the actors named in it, there are outstanding performances, starting with the lean and wolfish Angus Wright as Agamemnon, who is completely convincing as a loving father, and then astonishes us doubling as Aegisthus, his wife\u2019s lover. This is probably faithful to ancient Greek practice, where the actor would merely have changed his mask.<\/p>\n

\tLia Williams is stunning as Klytemnestra. We believe her when she says how much she loves her husband; and she conveys the full complexity of the character\u2019s emotions when she learns that her younger daughter is to be sacrificed because her religious husband believes he\u2019s been instructed to kill her by \u201cthe god,\u201d in order to have the wind blow and make it possible to sail to war.<\/p>\n

\tThe children, the young Orestes and Iphigenia (from a pool of six child actors), were excellent the night I saw the play. Luke Thompson is an interesting older Orestes, and Icke has had the clever idea of getting him to reconstruct his past in dialogue with his psychotherapist. Elektra is played as a teenaged rebel by Jessica Brown Findlay, a long way from her role in Downton Abbey. <\/p>\n

\tThis Oresteia marks the beginning of Rupert Goold\u2019s Greek Season at the Almeida. If the other productions are of this quality, he will have achieved a cultural landmark.<\/p>\n

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In three hours and forty minutes precisely, Robert Icke\u2019s new version of Aeschylus\u2019 three tragedies that constitute the Oresteia, unfolds on the stage of the Almeida Theatre in North London. The \u201cprecisely\u201d is important, because Icke has also directed the highly compressed production, and he plays on our own sense of time and urgency. Digital […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blogroll-2","8":"category-elsewhere","9":"category-uncategorized","10":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Oresteai.jpg?fit=2048%2C1363&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-hj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1076,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1076"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}