THE ORESTEIA

from The Greek Sense of Theater
1996
J. Michael Walton & J. Walton

... All it needs is a trust in the vision of the playwrights who first wrote these plays and a similar vision to translate this into terms a contemporary audience can appreciate. I can write now, as I wrote twelve years ago, that the these have never seemed more topical: warmongering in the guise of patriotism; demagoguery of the right, now more than of the left after the spectacular collapse of communism; the virtues and dangers of individualism; the rule of law and those who set themselves above it in the name of rank or cause. They could hardly be more immediate. And there are the perennial themes, the ones that Shakespeare explored as well: the responsibilities of kinship, friendship and citizenship, the assertion of spiritual values and the search, in the face of the most overwhelming of odds, for compassion.

That such issues can have an immediate and powerful bite was magnificently realized by Peter Stein in the revival in 1994 of his 1980 production of The Oresteia with a Russian cast and for a Russian audience reeling from the responsibility of trying to cope with the most democratic elections in their history. Stein's chorus of suspicious old men from the local taverna submitted grudgingly in Agamemnon to the sort of browbeating they could hardly oppose. The mourning women of Choephori, if a far cry from the slaves prescribed by he text, did demonstrate the capacity of the ordinary to begin to take sides and affect issues. Eumenides offered an extraordinary blend of near-farcical gods in the persons of a lyre-strumming Apollo and an Athene who presided over the court as though it were the Eurovision Song Contest, together with a set of Areopagites who were far from comfortable in their new role. When Athene declared in favour of Orestes' acquittal, the Furies' threat to curse the land became actuality. The set split as though shattered by an earthquake and the jury fell to brawling like street-fighters.

Athene's subsequent diplomatic success in invoking the Furies' cooperation was the revelation the play demands but a revelation tinged with unease, as they were systematically wrapped in crimson bindings till not even their eyes were visible and bundled away into niches in the set. The monumental themes of the play were translated into stage pictures of immediate impact for a modern audience, especially with the use of swaddling to suppress anything awkward. Cassandra arrived covered in a sheet. Clytemnestra's ghost was struggling vainly to escape from a black stocking which enveloped her from the head down and stretched a full ten yards past her retreating feet. Then to see the female Furies similarly gagged proposed less Aeschylus's resolution than an anxious expedient whose efficacy only time would test: and in a final twist, to watch the Furies' fingers start to free themselves offered a frisson that few moments in theater could match. Stein's vision is remarkable and his choice of play the most amenable to revolutionary treatment.

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