Theatre review: The Oresteia

By now I think we can take it as read that Simon Stone's adaptations of classic texts will actually be devised riffs vaguely inspired by a general theme, that share little with the original other than the title. I've had some very different responses to them over the years, and I suspect I like them in inverse proportion to how well I know the classic versions. And regular readers of this blog will both recall that I know Aeschylus' version of The Oresteia very well. Stone's version opens in 2016, in Lizzie Clachan's revolving glass house, where a privileged family are preparing for a 21st birthday party for their twin daughters. We know they're privileged because Christopher (David Morrissey) is genuinely annoyed with his cousin Jerome (John Macmillan) for buying several cases of Bollinger champagne for the party. Because it's too cheap.

Their ostentatious wealth comes from Christopher and his brother Melville's (Lloyd Hutchinson) company, which has supplied weapons to Putin's Russia, a business model they unconvincingly insist they dropped once they figured out what their parts were being used for.

One of the twins, Isobel, is missing her own party because she's at a protest against her father's company while the other, Alice (Rosie Sheehy,) is at home wallowing in the fact that even when she's not there her sister gets all the attention. The first of three acts is mostly spent getting to know the extended family and their dynamic, but it ends with a jump forward ten years to 2026, and younger brother Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) confessing to the murders of his mother Montie (Mary-Louise Parker) and Jerome, by this time her second husband.

The next two hours play as a thriller that time-jumps between the unpreposessing evening in 2016 that will end in the incident that turns the family against each other, the confession in 2026, and various points in between as they start to kill each other. Unlike the very public revenge killings of Aeschylus and Sophocles, here the murder of Christopher/Agamemon is succesfully disguised as a suicide, and it's left to the play's Cassandra figure Chandra (Rakhee Thakrar) to voice suspicions that are initially dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theories.

So the story turns into a murder mystery, which is where it being neither one thing nor the other became a problem for me: It's absolutely not the story of The Oresteia as we know it, but there's enough of it there to mean that I knew the shape the story would take once the pieces had been put back together. So ironically, where some more avant-garde adaptations of Greek tragedy are incoherent to anyone who doesn't go in knowing the story, this one is probably best experienced blind, as I heard people in both intervals saying they were hooked and wanting to know what the family's deep secret was. For me though, it's hard to make a Shock!Twist! out of the basic premise of a 2500-year-old story.

I don't think I'd have minded it not being the original tragedy so much if the end product felt like it was a whole new tragedy of its own, but for all the moody visuals of Clachan's spinning glass house there's nothing epic about this. The various lesser plot twists along the way - like the revelation that Augie has been having an on-off affair with Jerome's son Lorenzo (Archie Madekwe) - come in as melodramatic touches that just make a long evening even longer. There are interesting elements and it's unexpectedly funny - especially from a very much cast-against-type Sheehy as an awkward posh girl. But instead of a new tragedy Stone has given us a Netflix Harlan Coben thriller-of-the-week, so much so I spent the evening wondering when the pointless Richard Armitage cameo was coming up.

The Oresteia by Simon Stone after Aeschylus and others is booking until the 19th of September at the Bridge Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes including two intervals.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.