Oresteia Review – Simon Stone’s patchwork tragedy is a gripping and exasperating epic | stage

AAlthough writer-director Simon Stone has called his play “Oresteia,” the credits state that this is a drama “after Aeschylus and others.” Aeschylus is recognizable here, particularly in the first of the three most faithful and engaging parts. But the “others” are also important, with many shades of Greek tragedies appearing, from Antigone to Medea, and perhaps even Oedipus Rex.

Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and then her murder by their vengeful son, Orestes, carries over into modern urban family life. There’s Christopher (David Morrissey), who runs a technology company, his wife Monty (Mary-Louise Parker), an American alpha, and their children: Auggie (Tom Glenn Carney), offstage Isabelle and her twin, Alice (Rosie Sheehy). They are so lucky that they talk about Bollinger as a culinary wine, and they live in a house that has the corporate look of an upscale hotel chain.

Elements of Antigone come through the character of Isabel, based on Iphigenia, who is less innocent and more politically modern and who attacks the patriarch at home whose company has been involved in selling military equipment to countries including Russia, and whose bombs recently killed a group of children (a reference to All My Sons?). But the most brilliant departure is to chop up Aeschylus’s chronology. His cycle of violence takes us through the bloodbath killings and ends with the Eumenides, a departure from the moral and legal order. Here the killings are reported before they are dramatized, as a detective tracks down the vengeful Auggie.

The story jumps back and forth through time, from pre-Brexit Britain to the days of the pandemic to the present. Surprisingly, reverse storytelling still manages to maintain tension and control. But there is no sense of stubbornness and characters trapped in the machine of inescapable tragedy. Maybe because we don’t know them deeply. Like a TV thriller, the action grabs you, but the hectic plot doesn’t leave much room for the psychological element.

There is a lack of internal logic to the plot and flat and noisy characters. Monty is certainly angry at her husband’s sacrifice and Parker gives a strong performance, but you’re not sure what her intentions are. Do you kill on principle, on a whim, or out of anger? She seems to do all three at different moments. She and her lover Jerome (John MacMillan) kill Christopher while drunk but this diminishes Monty’s obvious anger. It’s as if Stone doesn’t trust the cold sensibilities of ancient Greek drama to ignite his narrative world. Christopher is a strangely sympathetic character, resigned to his guilt, beyond atonement, and Morrissey plays him in a convincingly disturbing way.

There are no gods here to intervene (although there is Melville, Christopher’s masked brother, played by Lloyd Hutchinson) and Christopher is given more of an exit in this version. He did not directly kill his daughter, so everything that comes as a result of this initial death is not entirely coherent in terms of motive and moral consequences.

Other characters are amusing but thin: Sloaney Alice’s self-flagellation is indulgent, albeit amusing in Sheehy’s hands, while Augie’s transformation into a war veteran and dead-eyed killer is too generic to feel real or tragic.

There are great, confident references for Greek theater buffs, but it feels like one story after another and builds a strange kind of mindlessness, continuing unabated. The cycle of domestic violence expanded to include that of Britain: the Anglo-Saxons emerged as a historical ‘conquest after invasion’. Contemporary wars – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Chechnya – are mentioned, although the current conflict in the Middle East is puzzlingly omitted.

In Lizzie Clachan’s dazzling set, we see the family inside their revolving house, the rooms exposed, the actions of the fugitives laid bare. It’s a very effective use of Stone’s signature glass box. His social satire is on point too, but it almost seems on the verge of dispatching this ridiculously titled family, and there is disturbing humor alongside the tragedy. By the third act, it starts to resemble a police procedural. There is a sense that these characters are trapped in their perpetually revolving lives, but there is also a sense that, in the end, we are stuck here with them.

It’s exhausting, invigorating, frustrating, original and artificial, with a lot thrown at it: Aeschylus, and then some.