Time Present and Time Past: The Oresteia

Sean Sheehan

It is over a century since Einstein established that the perception of time depends on an observer’s position but at Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall there is only one time – and it is registered by the hour, minute and second as displayed in digital format above the stage and in the foyer.

There are three intervals during the play – of fifteen, ten and three minutes – with each one ending on the second (and strictly no admittance if you’re late). During the actual course of the performance, the precise time of a character’s death also appears on the stage clock though, at the macro level, the Oreseteia is crucially concerned with the inheritance of a time past.

Agamemnon’s act – reluctantly persuaded to try and end a war by obeying a divine injunction to kill his own young daughter – reverberates across the years to come: the future cannot escape the past. The filicide is traumatic for his wife and himself and it only seems to be the case that time has healed the wound of a daughter’s sacrifice when Agamemnon’s wife triumphantly greets him upon his return from the battlefield many years later.

The consequences are bloody and this leads to their son, Orestes, finding himself having to wrestle with persecutory voices that demand retribution for a crime committed when he was a child.

This haunting story of time and retribution is dramatized with boldness and imagination in Robert Icke’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a play first performed in Athens some two and a half thousand years ago. Aeschylus was a renowned playwright in his own lifetime, winning prizes and plaudits for his work and this twenty-first-century production has also garnered some five-star reviews from theatre critics (‘This is Greek tragedy filtered through ‘The Sopranos’ … [making you feel] as if you have electrodes wired into your soul’ exclaims one awestruck reviewer).

It is easy to see why this production impresses: the actors give their all, electrifying their roles with displays of passion that grip modern audiences, though in ways that would have puzzled the ancient Greeks. Aeschylus did not write a searing domestic drama and he did not engage in psychological portrayals of his characters but here we have the former Downton Abbey star, Jessica Brown Findlay, playing the part of Electra and becoming a figment of the tortured imagination of her brother Orestes.

There is no chorus – this integral part of every ancient Greek drama replaced by a single therapist – and the stage design is daringly modern by employing sliding panels that are transparent or opaque depending on what the director wishes the audience to behold. Aeschylus’s text is freely and radically adapted, replacing the grandeur and imagery of the original with emotionally charged dialogue and a contemporary, post-Freudian and feminist sensibility.

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