The Oresteia at Globe Theatre, London SE1

4/5

A BLOODY cycle of familial revenge drives Aeschylus’s great trilogy of plays with the uneasy, and at times antagonistic, relationship between divine and civic law — as it is in much Greek tragedy.

In the first play the murder of his daughter Iphigenia by King Agamemnon ordered by Zeus ensures victory in the war against Troy. George Irving’s assured Agamemnon returns to Argos as a hero on his chariot with Cassandra — a slave girl whom he hands over to his humiliated but unfaithful wife Clytemnestra as booty — thus flaunting his male right to conjugal infidelity.

Katy Stephens provides an engaging portrait of Clytemnestra as a wronged but rhetorically eloquent woman who to Agamemnon is merely the mother of his legitimate children. While he shows no affection towards her, she feigns love and joy at his return before murdering him in his bath.

In the second play, Joel McCormack’s troubled Orestes arrives, pursued by the Furies who dispute his right to matricide.

But eventually, incited by Apollo, he avenges his father.

The god sees women’s sole purpose as producing heirs of undisputed paternity: “The mother’s just a vessel, her warm womb/Just keeps the child safe until it’s born./And when the child is born, it is its father’s./It takes its father’s name. It joins his line./The womb is nothing. Just an empty space.”

It’s impossible at this point not to reference The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which Friedrich Engels comments on the rise of monogamy and private property in the Greece of the period.

At the conclusion of the trilogy, the goddess Athena — given an appropriately reflective performance by Branka Katic — leads a court of judges. Reflecting the new democratic undercurrents in the Athens of Aeschylus’s time, she rules in favour of justice rather than revenge. The Furies are renamed Euminides (the “kind”) — and Orestes is freed.

Adele Thomas’s assured direction draws on Rory Mullarkey’s innovative adaptation, whose rich and rhythmic verse is seamed with powerful and occasionally comic imagery as events move inexorably through tragedy to a kind of redemption.

A simple set and visual imagery of burning torches, corpses and blood make their impact, as does the chorus, a group of citizens who comment and chant as they watch the tragedy unfold.

While there are inconsistencies in the costume design — there’s a contemporary feel to the leather-clad paramilitary force protecting Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, while elsewhere there’s a timeless effect — this doesn’t detract from what is a thought-provoking interpretation in which Mira Calix’s haunting music sets the mood.

The latter is at its most effective in the chants underscoring the festival celebrating justice at the end in which — an ironic touch? — a giant golden phallus is paraded.

Well worth seeking out.

Runs until October 16, box office: shakespearesglobe.com