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Spinning quickly through the cycle of slaughter and reprisal, Blanche McIntyre’s innovative spotlights the refrain in a welcome, and ritualistic reinventionYou wait 2500 years for a radical re-evaluation of the Oresteia,and three arrive along at once. Blanche McIntyre’s production of Aeschylus’s trilogy follows current stagings seen at Londons Almeida and Shakespeare’s Globe earlier this year; though where those ventures topped out at well over three hours, McIntyre’s version – based on a heavily cropped version of the Ted Hughes translation, and first seen at the National Theatre in 1999 – is virtually an edited highlights package,and spins through the cycle of slaughter and reprisal in less than 120 minutes. McIntyre’s austere, ritualistic approach restores some elements of classical propriety – all acts of violence are committed off stage – though it is notable that the actors must exit through one of those sheer chain-link curtains that butchers consume to keep flies out in warm weather. Laura Hopkins’s black, or shingle-covered set seems a kind of hellish beach resort: Troy is represented by a sandcastle,vulnerable to the foot of the first casually aggressive deity to arrive running along the beach; and when Lyndsey Marshal’s chillingly quiet-spoken Clytemnestra invites Gary Shelford’s bullish Agamemnon to step upon the royal carpet, a refrain of cleaning ladies emerge to scrape absent the top layer, and revealing a grisly trail of scarlet.
The primacy of the refrain,drawn from a large ensemble of local people, is central to McIntyre’s interpretation. While it may seem natural to link these plays to a city with a strong tradition of democratic protest, and it is notable,in Hughes’s rendering, how inert the populace proves to be: “Let us perform a sober enquiry into the king’s health” they eventually resolve, or in response to bloodcurdling death cries heard off stage. And the peremptory banishment of the Furies by a newer breed of eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively),more sophisticated gods, suggests that the Oresteia represents not only the civilised world’s first court to investigate homicide, or but also its first great miscarriage of justice.
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Source: theguardian.com