Rehearsed reading review: Girl on an Altar

Alongside the more finished works that have been appearing online during the last year of lockdown, it's perhaps surprising that more rehearsed readings haven't also been on the menu - perhaps theatres have been too busy trying to ensure they can eventually reopen their doors, to spend much time trying out the shows they hope to put on when they do. But if the latest in a long line of promises actually turns out true there might be light at the end of the tunnel, and Marina Carr’s new play Girl on an Altar is one Indhu Rubasingham hopes to add to a future Kiln season. So she and Susie McKenna direct a one-off reading that was live-streamed tonight from the Kiln stage, and in a companion piece to her Hecuba, Carr returns to the aftereffects of the Trojan War to look at the Greek side of the story. The play focuses on the first major murder of the Oresteia, but like Robert Icke she first looks back ten years to the inciting event: The sacrifice of Iphigenia.

Theatre review: Antigone (Barbican / Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg / Toneelgroep Amsterdam)

Already celebrated internationally, Ivo van Hove became an instant superstar director in London as well last year, by stripping down Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge until it was exposed as a Greek tragedy. So despite Juliette Binoche in the title role, a lot of the excitement about Antigone has come from the director returning to take on an actual Greek tragedy. A civil war between Antigone and Ismene's brothers has left them both dead, and their uncle Kreon (Patrick O'Kane) King of Thebes. Having somewhat unexpectedly got this new power, Kreon is keen to appear strong from the off, and decrees that while Eteokles, the brother who fought on his side, will have the traditional funeral rites, the rebel Polyneikes' body will be denied burial or mourning. This goes against every tenet of the gods, and while Ismene (Kirsty Bushell) and the townspeople are cowed by Kreon into following his demands, Antigone determines to bury her brother.