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.

Theatre review: The Lady from the Sea

Simon Stone is known for his versions of classic plays, that are sometimes not so much loose adaptations as tangentially connected to the originals at best, and I've found the results very mixed in the past. For The Lady from the Sea he strikes a better balance though, in something with very distinct and current themes but a structure and basis that still feels recognisably by Henrik Ibsen. Five years ago celebrated neuroscientist Edward (Andrew Lincoln) lost his first wife to suicide, and is still dealing with the fallout with their two daughters Asa (Gracie Oddie-James,) a gay postgraduate student who's secretly saving up for a PhD at Yale by opening an OnlyFans, and blunt, brooding teenager Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike.) Egg has managed to move on and find some stability in his life though, with his second marriage to the younger Ellida (Alicia Vikander.)

Theatre review: Phaedra

Australian writer-director Simon Stone's calling card appears to be classical adaptations that keep the original title but very little else; at least his take on Phaedra, after a couple of hours that are unrecognisable even as radical adaptation of the original myth, end up in a place that deals with the same kind of actions and consequences. The play is credited as being "after Euripides, Seneca and Racine." I haven't seen the Seneca version because nobody stages Seneca, but there's certainly no initial link to the story told in the other two. Helen (Janet McTeer) is a high-profile opposition MP, her husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi) a diplomat who grew up in Britain after his parents fled the Iranian Revolution. As a family they don't seem too big on boundaries, and if Helen is going to develop a fixation on a younger man, the initial candidate seems to be her son-in-law Eric (John Macmillan,) with whom she has an awkwardly flirtatious relationship.

Theatre review: Medea

A Dutch company presenting an Australian version of a Greek tragedy to a British audience; if it sounds like Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Amsterdam (now renamed Internationaal Theater Amsterdam) you'd be right, although this time it's Simon Stone adapting and directing Euripides, Vera Hoogstad and Peter Van Kraaij translating his new text into Dutch and captions translating it back to English at the Barbican. One of my favourite performers from van Hove's Roman Tragedies, Marieke Heebink leads a reinvented Medea, a play whose basic story is a faithfully modernised version of the one Euripides told, but which in a couple of crucial details - one of them at the start, one at the end - is as major a departure from the original as Stone's version of Yerma was. The first big difference is that, although the Medea of the original myth had a history of violence against her own family, at the opening of Euripides' version nobody has an inkling she might turn it against her husband.

Theatre review: Yerma

Yerma isn't actually yer ma, she's not anybody's ma, that's the problem: Writer/director Simon Stone does a loose - very loose - adaptation of Federico García Lorca's play about a woman with a malfunctioning uterus. Relocated to present-day London, Billie Piper plays a journalist identified only as "Her," who's never had any particular wish for children until she and husband John (Brendan Cowell) buy their own house. On the night they move in they decide to try for a child after all, and ceremonially destroy her birth control pills, but as years go by and her sister Mary (Charlotte Randle) seems to have baby after baby despite no apparent wish to, Her remains childless through endless rounds of IVF. In Lorca's original, it's the whole of society judging Yerma for failing to produce a child, but in a 2016 context it becomes her own personal obsession that starts to drive her mad.