The Oresteia - York Theatre Royal – 12/02/09.

It has often been said that revenge is a dish best served cold. The Oresteia, comprising the plays Agamemnon, The Choephori and The Eumenides, is surely one of the chilliest helpings in the annals of literature.

Its particular liaisons dangereuses have been written about so exhaustively and the central characters are of such mythical resonance. The plot involves an extraordinarily ardent cycle of familial blood-letting instigated by Agamemnon, King of Argos, and propagated by his wife Clytemnestra (who does him in) and their exiled son Orestes (who, in turn, cooks her goose). Revenge breeds revenge until the matricidal Orestes, plagued by chthonian Furies and his own guilt-ridden conscience, is forced to face trial at the Temple of Athene. His resulting acquittal provides the action’s cathartic climax, and underscores the play’s democratic principles.

Dominic Allen and James Wilkes’s new adaptation of Aeschylus’s masterpiece is not Belt-Up (Nothing to See/Hear)’s first foray into ancient drama; Wilkes’s version of Euripides’ classic Women of Troy was an integral part of The Red Room project at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. However, staging The Oresteia at the Theatre Royal provided an altogether grander challenge. The plays are the only extant example of an Ancient Greek trilogy, and an attempt to roll them all into a consecutive ninety minute ramble-through illustrates the ambition we have come to expect of the company’s productions.

I’ll say it plain: it is impossible, even for the most auspiciously demanding critic, not to be impressed by the intricacy and technical flair of the vast majority of this work. In many ways, this is amateur theatre close to its best. I generally found the text, jointly penned by the co-directors, a lambent and often surprisingly lyrical re-telling of an old tale, mercifully removed from the arid academia of many readily-available paperback translations. The direction was miraculously muted.

The phantasmagorias of physical hi-jinks were deployed with a greater degree of accuracy and restraint than ever before, which rendered the elements of mime, dance, puppetry and immersive raillery more justifiable in context. The actors, skimmed cream of the Dramasoc crop, turned-in uniformly solid performances. It is unfair, in a sense, to name names; individuals in the world of Belt-Up are wilfully subsumed into the force of a collective whole. Nevertheless, I must especially praise Rachel Finnegan and Marcus Emerton for tackling the two characters of real, psychological depth. Finnegan’s Clytemnestra was gorgeously iconoclastic and Emerton’s Agamemnon a (literally) towering paragon of swaggering pomp.

I do retain a nagging, crucial reservation. It would be a crime for this collective to suffer too severely from that surfeit well-known of the Greeks; hubris. There were moments of alarming excess. A song-and-dance routine fell flat, completely at odds with the otherwise fluid narrative flow. Furthermore, the introduction of the sacrificial Iphigenia at the play’s conclusion was a sentimental and arbitrary addition to what is, by general consensus, a decent enough yarn. As it was a mistake for Agamemnon to consider himself the equal of gods, it is an act of unforgivable pretence to consider ourselves the equal in philosophical purity to the Greek tragedians.

At its best the company produces vital modern theatre; street smart, witty and alive. The Oresteia’s faults were Hellenic as a working indication of how indulgence murders all art, as it kills all life and suffocates all love. It was still undoubtedly their best work to date, bursting with ideas and inventive execution; an illicit pleasure running deep and lingering long in the memory.

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