★★☆☆☆
It’s bad timing to stage a reinvention of this Ancient Greek story so soon after Robert Icke’s remarkable new version of Oresteia in London last year. In the prelude that Icke added to Aeschylus’s trilogy, he included a stunning retelling of how Agamemnon came to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods and enable his fleet to sail to Troy. It was lucid, unnervingly contemporary and heartbreaking.
Even if you didn’t see that show, though, this pair of double bills of short plays comes across as four bamboozling postscripts rather than fully fledged drama. In Agamemnon, by Caroline Bird, we see the Greek commander agonising over what he has to do. Bird is a poet as well as a playwright so there are some quotable lines, but precious little actually happens. It’s all talk talk talk, agony agony agony. It’s dull dull dull.
It’s performed alongside Clytemnestra, by Lulu Raczka, which gives us talk in stereo. A director starts telling us about the story, inviting us to think of the worst day we ever had — but far, far worse — and imagine it happening to, say, Charlize Theron in the new Mad Max movie. Then a lecturer comes on and starts analysing the story. Good start. Oh, but then it goes into quadrophonic overkill as Clytemnestra’s maid and a returning soldier from Troy arrive and descends into noisy, anguished arthouse wibble.
The best of these playlets, Iphigenia, comes in the other pairing. Suhayla El-Bushra makes Agamemnon a bit of a macho fool, Clytemnestra a faded party girl, and gets Iphigenia to embrace self-sacrifice as a contrast to her self-seeking parents. There are moments of proper drama. Shame El-Bushra then underlines it all too vehemently at the end when Agamemnon’s fancy speech-making is pointedly contrasted with Achilles hoisting her blood-spattered corpse.
Alas, its companion piece, Chorus, by the often excellent Chris Thorpe, is utterly tedious. Ever wondered what the Greek chorus’s angle on all these events might be? Me neither. Thorpe makes the chorus a bit Ancient Greek, a bit modern global television audience, appalled by and salivating at the prospect of appalling deeds, and lets it all drift on and on. The redeeming feature in Elayce Ismail’s production is the nifty way the performers keep dropping sweet wrappers on Cécile Trémolières’ dais set. Where do they keep them all? Trying to figure that one out kept me going.
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The other three directors — Christopher Haydon, Jennifer Tang, Rebecca Hill — also serve up stark, stylish productions. And the ensemble of eight are terrific throughout: Shannon Tarbet’s Iphigenia and Andrew French’s Agamemnon are particularly memorable. Yet you long for sharper storytelling to underpin the experimentation in an unrewardingly oblique pair of evenings.
Box office: 020 7229 0706, to May 21