Ritual Review – Pizza, beatings, and paint-drying in an eight-hour epic with Orestes | platform

eEgg yolks are mixed to make gold paint when she arrives at Ritual, an eight-hour installation in a windowless basement that appears like a Messene palace. I just missed Orestes (Charlie McRae Todd, in a hoodie and three stripes) fighting a doorman with a knife, an audience member whispered to me, before he was violently silenced. After being disciplined, we go back to watching the paint dry.

In this ambitious but under-resourced production from Witness, which premiered in New York, this former prince lives in exile, awaiting communication from the gods before avenging his father’s murder. For as long or as little as we please, we are called to wait with Him.

Written by Michael Pontatibus and directed by Charlotte Murray, Ritual requires patience but doesn’t always reward it. Be lucky with your arrival time and you’ll witness a fight with one of the Furies or catch Orestes making a simple meat sacrifice. But when you show up at the useless patch, you’ll spend a good chunk of time watching him gnaw on his dinner, hang up the curtains, or stare glumly at the old maps and song sheets on the wall.

We are free to explore in this expansion of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, touching anything except electrical appliances and other people. But the two rooms in the industrial space are limited, with much of the DIY clothing evocative of a recent raid on a charity shop: a Creme Egg cup; old paint pots; Torn copies of Ibsen’s plays. The rooms do not look like they have been transformed much as they are temporarily used as a storage room. The first space contains a worn mattress, a lettering desk, and several shelves stacked with boxes of books, cloth, and small model soldiers. The second resembles a prayer room, with images lit by plastic candles.

We pan around Orestes as he moves between rooms, trying to get out of his way without blocking anyone else’s view – a difficult feat when everyone’s attention is focused on the same man. Much of the performance is internal as Orestes thinks, waits, and writes, his thoughts often hidden from us as fleeting ghosts. For longer-stay guests, there are a few places to sit behind the floor, which I always seem to choose when our son is on another far-flung errand.

The narrative is thinly spread, held together by looking over Orestes’ shoulder to read the letters he writes, and the occasional monologue he records on tapes. He uses this method to keep track of his days, though we gradually discover that he’s been stuck here for much longer than he thought. The rules of the world itself are frustratingly ill-defined. He has a shrine to his father’s old war helmet, but he orders pizza from Deliveroo. We are firmly trapped in the basement with him, but we do witness a scene at the dinner table with Menelaus, where Helen repeatedly calls her husband “children.”

Making The Hidden Days of Orestes experimental is a great idea – especially since it’s free to attend – but the scaffolding of this production struggles to maintain the claustrophobic intensity it desires. There is no doubt that the creative team brought great knowledge and textual originality to the story, but they forgot to help us find the clues. “The gods can be ambiguous,” Orestes writes to his uncle. This production can work no matter how many hours you spend with it.