ORESTES: BLOOD & LIGHT. To 2 December.

London

ORESTES: BLOOD & LIGHT
by Helen Edmundson based on Euripides

Tricycle Theatre To 2 December 2006
Runs 1hr 40min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7328 1000
www.tricycle.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 November at Oxford Playhouse

Tragedy not so much for, as too completely of, the modern age.Shared Experience never do a bad show. And there’s hardly anything wrong with this one. Only that the voices lose expressive detail at high volume, with the possible exception of Mairead McKinley’s intense Electra and the certain one of Jeffery Kissoon’s magnificently regal Tyndareos

If only there were more faults. This is too well-packaged for the modern age, though Helen Edmundson’s adaptation is acute and if not faithful to Euripides she doesn’t claim it is, while Euripides’ play itself is hardly in the great league.

This is the fag-end of Greek Tragedy, the end of the 5th century BC, when Euripides was old and Athens’ Golden Age more than a little tarnished by war and politics. Orestes, who moves from barbarism to civilisation, from the sword to the law-court in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and who is the urgent righter-of-wrongs in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ respective Electras, is here discovered exhausted, spread-eagled on a bed while sister Electra watches, brooding for more revenge.

But the earlier impulse has soured, as they are themselves confined, awaiting judgment from a regime which keeps them as dangerous prisoners in a room noted for its shelves of shoes.

If they are the beautiful Helen of Troy’s, they’re also reminiscent of Imelda Marcos. Yet instead of opening up a play to contemporary resonances, “somehow - I know not how” this production seems to constrict the original into alignment with contemporary ideas.

Maybe it’s the loss of anything unexpected, the way every point fits a standardised liberal perspective. The result’s like a code, elegant and complex but once read telling nothing new. Or an animated dinner-table conversation where it’s suddenly apparent all the enthusiastic talk is not developing anything new, merely repeating received notions for the talkers’ mutual self-satisfaction.

The arrogance of power, the soured determination of the dispossessed, the characters’ general self-consciousness, are all stock features of a strain of modern drama. In content and style, this production seems too ready to feed its anticipated audiences what they want and are likely to find acceptable at the same time it seems, on the surface, challenging and new.

Menelaos: Tim Chipping
Tyndareos: Jeffery Kissoon
Electra: Mairead McKinley
Helen: Clara Onyemere
Slave: Claire Prempeh
Orestes: Alex Robertson

Director: Nancy Meckler
Designer: Niki Turner
Lighting: Peter Harrison
Sound/Composer: Peter Salem
Movement: Liz Ranken
Company voice work: Annemette Verspeak
Dialect: Majella Hurley
Syrian singing: Abdul Salam Kheir
Assistant director: Ellie Jones

2006-11-30 13:50:50