Roman tragedy meets torture porn, anyone? OK, “torture porn” is slightly overstating the horror-film flavour of this audacious revival of Seneca’s play, as translated by Caryl Churchill. Human flesh may get eaten here — but only offstage. A loving dad may be presented with the severed faces of his children — but they’re hard to make out amid the shadows and smoke of Hannah Clark’s set, in which dark deeds are enacted amid cabinets and box files.
Which makes this the ultimate bad day at the office for Jamie Ballard’s Thyestes. Ballard, with his gentle manner, facial hair and casual wear, doesn’t look like a man who could steal his brother’s wife, let alone steal a sacred golden ram to nab his half of the kingdom of Argos. But then Nick Fletcher’s wonderfully subdued Atreus, in his sta-prest slacks and safari jacket, is more middle-manager than king.
Back on the throne, Atreus insists that the deposed Thyestes resume joint rule with him. Is all really forgiven? Or is revenge about to served up cold as dry ice? “What’s going to go wrong?” asks Thyestes’s cherubic son Tantalus. “Everything,” says Thyestes, presciently.
Polly Findlay’s production starts with a bang, as the protagonist’s dead grandfather — also called Tantalus and also played by Ballard — is brought up, sopping wet, from the Underworld. She goes on to contrast ordinary men, such as Youssef Kerkour’s vest-wearing Fury, or Michael Grady-Hall’s alarmed Chorus, with the spooky sense of impending “Oh my God! My eyes! Aaargh!” familiar from the Saw films. Video screens flicker into life. An eerie soundtrack scrapes away throughout these 70 minutes. Against that, the low-key acting recasts these Roman royals as ordinary men. Atreus, in particular, is as banal as he is evil.
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Churchill’s translation, first performed in 1994, is spare and wry, an attempt to get close to the muscular original Latin. “You can have vast power,” says Thyestes, “if you can manage without power”. Yet if this fine production is more exciting viewed in hindsight than it is at the time, it’s because the smoke and shadows don’t always suit the declaiming. Having introduced us to a world of dread and shocks, Findlay can only unspool events more slowly than we’ve been set up to expect.
Fletcher is a delight, but so even is his keel that there is too much pressure on Ballard to provide the fireworks. He plays it well, but his squeals of horror are too extreme to convince in this context. Even so, Findlay’s staging makes this one-act revenge drama well worth catching. Make it through the murkier first half, and this is a short, sharp shocker with a hell of a sting.
Box office: 020-7503 1646, to June 27