What is the difference between this and the German productions? The Oresteia has become more solid, more beautiful, more precise and less didactic. It reflects strong influence of Stein's Shakespearean experience in Salzburg. The Oresteia is a monumental piece, perfect and elevated. The powerful tragic overtones take the most exquisite form. Moidele Bickel only slightly changed and embellished the Schaubuhne space designed by Earnest German. ... The Moscow version of The Oresteia is a great and captivating spectacle. ... Stein created an exceptionally powerful and beautiful music of words. The arias, duets, fugues and choruses are blended together into a majestic vocal orchestra. He entrusts the word with what mustn't be underrated in the flow of mise-en-scenes. He stakes (and wins) on a scenic interpretation that does not obey any kind of theatrical fashion, and affirms theatre as a place where the key role is played by the word. ... The production is the Russian audience's first introduction to this great – perhaps the greatest – theatrical text.

Stein is only too well aware that The Oresteia is called for every time the old order gives way to the new one, one historical epoch is pressing on the other and mankind is painfully trying to work out something to replace the old system. The director also knows that the future is inevitably fraught with the vices of the past. ... In the four months of intensive work, Stein and the Russian actors created an event that is needed by the Russian culture, which today finds itself in a period of self-realization and self-identification. The event, however, has not become a sensation.

Not even in the productions of Hall, Mnouchkine and Ronkoni have I seen the huge arc of Aeschylus's trilogy so clearly and vividly presented. Stein's achievement is to give each moment a fierce emotional reality while conveying the sense of dynamism within the trilogy. ... Someone once suggested that the final choruses of The Oresteia were in the mood of Beethoven's Hymn to Joy. Stein doesn't quite go that far. But he implies that out of travail and violence comes a yearning for order and stability. It is that suggestion that democratic freedom is at least a possibility, that makes his Oresteia an overwhelming political and humanist experience.

Peter Stein's legendary Oresteia is as fresh and captivating as ever. The Russian actors, first and foremost the actresses, have adorned the austere form of Stein's production with vibrating emotions and unbounded expressiveness.

Stein did not modernize Aeschylus. He merely related a story that is as old and as new as the world, using dazzlingly vivid imagery. Ancient history and newest scenic technologies blended together beautifully, as did Western irony and the profundity of the ancient tragedy.

Stein's Oresteia is the classics of the classics, and also Russia as seen from from afar and from above. Such a portrayal is not a surprise. Stein conceived of this production as a message to Russia, "humanitarian aid" in the literal sense of these words, wanting to "participate," to "help sort things out". He stages The Oresteia for us like Hamlet staged The Mousetrap, like the patients of the Charanton mental clinic enacted the story of Marquise de Sade, in all three cases the purpose being recognition, accusation and therapy.

The power of the Russian theatre is enormous, and it perfectly matches the energy that Greek tragedy instills and conveys. From the experience I've had the opportunity to accumulate in the past ten years, trying to establish connections between theatrical styles in Germany, Greece, Italy, Britain, French and Russia, by comparing and juxtaposing various cultures as well as by studying the works of Stanislavsky, I've come to the conclusion that the Russian actors clearly stand out for sensitivity of their performance. Their exceptionally musical language seems to rejoice in coloroturas, and appears to be the most suitable for decoding Greek tragedy. ... The Oresteia, being a kind of intellectual adventure, helped me realize that the actors in many different parts of the world – France, Germany, Russia, Epidaurus, Holland, etc. – have been going beyond my instruction to enact an exciting, highly emotional and captivating finale that, in a way, elevates the preceding ideas and denotes their collective development.