Peter Stein has created a majestic and yet flawed production of Aeschylus' Oresteian Trilogy, which starts on a high note and then goes downhill

Last Monday morning, The Scotsman carried a picture of an old Russian woman, headscarf knotted tightly round her face, weeping at a memorial service in Moscow for the victims of the attempted 1991 coup against Gorbachev's reforms. The caption doesn't say, of course, exactly why she was weeping. She may have been a relative of one of the dead, crying the age-old tears of mourning; she may have wept in regret for a time when communism meant something more than corruption, or in anger because so few of those who oppressed and killed during those years have been brought to justice. But whatever the source of her tears, it's on this intimate, contemporary Russian knowledge of the sorrow and pain of a state gone wrong, of the festering agony of old griefs and of the fierce temptations of vengeance, that Peter Stein builds the finest moments in his majestic production of Aeschylus' Oresteian Trilogy, created in Moscow last winter and brought to Edinburgh for three performances in the great hangar of Murrayfield Ice Rink.

At the opening of the first play of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, Stein's 12-strong chorus of old men of Argos shuffle onto the stage in the greatcoat and soft hat uniform of old Soviet functionaries and sit down at what looks like the committee table of a pensioners' club, rejoicing in the rumours of a great Greek victory at Troy, but uneasy and ashamed of the pit of bad government into which Argos has fallen in Agamemnon's absence, and of the adultery of the queen, Clytemnestra. And from the moment when this magnificent chorus – witty, grief-stricken, full of individual personalities – first raises its voice, the scene is set for a fiercely focussed Agamemnon in which the 2,500 years that separate us from Aeschylus seem to dissolve in the sheer urgency of the issues he raises: in the search for some end or redemption to the hideous cycle of blood and vengeance that plagues Agamemnon's house, and in the sickening, timeless sound of blood dripping to the stone floor from the platform on which Clytemnestra, in implacable rage over Agamemnon's wartime sacrifice of their beloved daughter Iphigeneia, slaughters her returning husband.

But the production never again reaches the heights of drama and precision achieved in this mighty Agamemnon; and the reason is that this slow taming of the primitive spirit of vengeance into the calm civic forum of Athene's court at Athens, which shapes the whole trilogy, is not its only theme; rumbling along beneath the surface is a much less resolved preoccupation with patriarchy, and the proper relationship of men and women. Agamemnon's cold sacrifice of Iphigeneia has unleashed a fury in Clytemnestra, and in the whole female universe, which cannot really be assuaged by the all-male court at Athens, or by the blandishments of Athene, the motherless daughter of Zeus doomed forever to support the principle of male supremacy. In its superb closing sequence, in which the avenging female Furies, tamed, bound and gagged at Athene's court, slowly and terrifyingly begin to fight free again from their winding-sheets, Stein's production seems to understand this.

But for much of the final play The Eumenides – and all of the weak central section, The Libation-Bearers – the women of the chorus seem deeply uncertain how seriously to take themselves and the forces they represent, strangely inclined to play, ingratiatingly, for laughs; and this is sad. For the exclusion of women from power in the West, and all the pathological suppression of the feminine that has flowed from it, has not been a joke, but a fatal disjunction; and for all its grandeur, there is something flawed about a production of The Oresteia which cannot sustain a sense of awe, and even terror, in relation to a theme which so disturbed Aeschylus in his time, and still disturbs us today. ...