'The Oresteia' review — Simon Stone delivers bloodcurdling horror in modern reimagining of Greek tragedy

Read our review of The Oresteia, now in performances at the Bridge Theatre to 19 September.

Summary

• The Oresteia is a modern imagining of the Greek trilogy by Aeschylus
• Simon Stone has a history of reinventing classic texts including last year's The Lady from the Sea
• David Morrissey; Mary-Louise Parker; Rosie Sheehy and Tom Glynn-Carney star in the play

Director Simon Stone’s process is an unusual one. Rather than beginning rehearsals with the finished script, he develops it in collaboration with the actors, meaning his productions are often being tweaked right up to opening. It must be a terrifying process, and even more so when that project is a three-and-a-half hour epic reimagining of Aeschylus’ Greek trilogy of plays The Oresteia, now in performances at the Bridge Theatre.

As with his previous modern adaptations of classic texts such as Phaedra, The Wild Duck, and Yerma (all of which, like The Oresteia, appear in a suffocating glass box), Stone only loosely follows the structure of the original text — interrogating it and creating something entirely new. Here, Stone has taken Aeschylus’ tale of cycles of trauma and revenge and placed it in the well-to-do yet dysfunctional home of the Middletons, showing how political misalignment, greed, generational trauma, and mental illness can tear a family apart.

Christopher (played by the ever-gruff David Morrissey) runs a shady company with his crass brother Melville (Lloyd Hutchinson); his American wife Montie (a wonderfully snide Mary-Louise Parker) is throwing a joint 21st birthday party for their daughters Alice (a comically posh Rosie Sheehy) and Isabel: the first a teacher, floating into adulthood, and the latter a political activist, who is absent from the party to attend a protest — and being covered for by younger brother Augie (House of the Dragon’s Tom Glynn-Carney). They are joined by extended family members Jerome (John Macmillan) — Christopher’s cousin — and his son Lorenzo (Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe), who are drawn to the central family like bees to honey.

It becomes clear that long before any of the bloodshed, this is a family divided and protecting secrets: Christopher is in debt and trouble at work; Augie is having troubling visions in the woods; Isabel is railing against her family; Alice is adrift and isolated, and Lorenzo resents his father.

Stone cleverly uses an oscillating timeline — between the play’s beginnings in 2016 and the present day — to unpack how these lies and secrets lead to a suicide and four grisly murders, peeling back the layers of the play like an open wound that refuses to heal.

His direction is masterful, as Lizzie Clachan’s chilling glass home sickeningly rotates between each revelatory scene — one moment revealing a bloodied body in a bath, the next, a tense dinner party. Dark humour collides with grim horror until the final act, which becomes an unrelenting barrage of grief as the broken Augie (by the war in Afghanistan, but chiefly by his family) falls in and out of a fugue state, snatches of buried memories pushing through. There is no need for a trial — as in the third part of the original trilogy. The startling burden of wasted life is laid bare.

The cast is astonishingly strong. Morrissey and Parker have grim chemistry, showing how guilt can curdle and kill a relationship. She turns malevolent in her grief, taking cold pleasure in the murder of Christopher and proclaiming herself “the angel of vengeance”, while Macmillan — as her accomplice and second husband Jerome — is completely undone by guilt and welcomes death. Sheehy is eminently watchable as the fast-talking, socially stunted Alice, and Glynn-Carney delivers a gut-wrenching performance as a man undone by his own mind, conjuring memories of his recent performance in Ivo Van Hove’s All My Sons — another play about buried family guilt.

The brutal conflict that occurs within the walls of the Middleton home are a microcosm for the wars waging beyond their front door. There is no doubt Stone’s adaptation is a play for today — and one that the Greeks would be proud of.

The Oresteia is at the Bridge Theatre to 19 September. Book The Oresteia tickets on London Theatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Oresteia (Photos by Johan Persson)