Clytemnestra, played by a lithe Lia Williams, is largely stripped of her monstrosity here, more frustrated powerfrau than vengeful killer. Yet that is also where the tension begins to fray. How can she be one minute resigned to the death and, in the next act, screaming with orgiastic joy in killing her husband? There is a complex algebra to the adaptation of the classics which means they are harder to decipher the more external narratives are foist on the original.
By the time we reach the return of Agamemnon in victory from Troy, too much psychobabble has been loaded onto the plot for comfort and Aeschylus has effectively been sacked in favour of contemporary fixations. “Orestes, honey,” frets Clytemnestra, sounding at times like a Camden mum recommending psychotherapy. The final trial scene undermines Aeschylus’s brilliant coup de theatre in letting Orestes (a pallid Luke Thompson) off, by suggesting that this is the result of gender bias in the courts. It’s all very UK Feminista, but robs the ending of its sense of deliverance and catharsis. What a shame. This Oresteia is a formidable undertaking, approached with verve. But imbued with so many modern concerns, it buckles under the weight.
All round, it is a promising summer for antique Greeks on stage, with a production of Iphigenia in Tauris at the Rose Bankside until July 4. Should you relish some classics al fresco and free during the school holidays, Women of Troy, niftily adapted by Lisa Kuma, is at the Scoop outside City Hall throughout August.
A final batch of high politics, and murderous intent is served up at the Bush Theatre by James Graham, who reinvigorated political theatre with the excellent dissection of minority government in the 1970s, This House.
The Angry Brigade dwells in the same era and dissects the motivations of Britain’s very own Baader-Meinhof tribute band of wannabe terrorists and the Met’s pursuit of them. You can see what attracted Graham to the milieu of plodding policemen engaging with anarchist philosophy, free love and dope-addled reasoning. But the result is heavy-handed and far better re-created in TV’s Life on Mars. The second act, exploring the motivations of the befuddled revolutionaries (played by the same quartet of actors as their police pursuers), is more revelatory, focused on the the inner lives of the characters, as their convictions waver and internal tensions — political, sexual and social — shred their grim unity.
Parallels with the difficulties of dealing with Islamic fundamentalism and its recruitment of the young today are heavily suggested. But the Angry Brigade was too transient a movement to give that a secure foundation. One of its members noted subsequently that it should more properly have been called the “slightly cross brigade”. We leave wondering what all the fuss was about.
