Review: Oresteia Reimagined: Simon Stone’s Oresteia at the Bridge Theatre

I walked into the Bridge Theatre in London on Saturday not entirely sure what I was expecting from Simon Stone’s Oresteia. I know Aeschylus’ Oresteia pretty well - professionally. It’s a trilogy I’ve lived with for decades, ever since seeing Peter Hall’s famously austere National Theatre production in 1981 and then reading or teaching (I think) all of it over the years, some in Greek and all in translation. At seventeen I was frankly overwhelmed by Hall’s production with its masked chorus, stylised acting and ritual pacing. I wasn’t ready for it. We sat a long way to the back and it was only afterwards on the minibus home that one of my fellow students commented on the ‘amazing masks’ that everyone wore.  I am very short-sighted: I wasn’t even aware that they were even wearing masks! The significance of the whole thing was lost on me. It was an Event – too sophisticated for me, and very, very long. But I do remember the music, the regular thumping of the percussion; and the rhythms of the verses by Tony Harrison even now: ‘Batter! Batter! Batter the doom drum!’ I tried, a few years later, to get something of that raw feeling into the music I wrote for the choruses of Euripides’ Ajax, which we performed at King’s College London in the original Greek when I was in my third year.

So I was curious, perhaps even wary, to see what Stone would do with a story I was now much more familiar with. How do you translate the murder of Agamemnon, the vengeance of Orestes, the fury of the Erinyes, and the birth of Athenian justice into a modern idiom without flattening the myth? I have to be honest – I wasn’t looking forward to it (going to a Greek play always feels like a busman’s holiday); however, a friend had a spare ticket and I put all previous thoughts out of my mind and went along.

A Kaleidoscope of Time, Place, and Trauma

Stone’s answer is to reject linearity altogether. The play begins in a luxurious penthouse in Sevenoaks- yes, Sevenoaks - where Chris (excellently played by David Morrissey), a CEO of a manufacturing firm, is implicated in the illegal use of his products in missile attacks. His estranged daughter Isobel (a thinly veiled Iphigenia) has “gone off the rails,” though the play’s fractured chronology means we learn her fate in pieces.

The set itself becomes a character: a revolving house that reveals rooms, corridors and fragments of domestic life. The Bridge Theatre has one of the most up-to-date set of stage mechanicals as one could ever want: while the whole building rotated, providing glimpses in the lives of Agamemnon (sorry, Chris!) and his anguished, drug-addled wife Montgomery (sorry – Clytemnestra!) (played by Mary-Louise Parker) characters walked through scenes, finish conversations in different spaces and appear in unexpected corners.  It’s visually mesmerising and dramatically disorienting, matching the fractured narrative itself. The Oresteia is broken into pieces, the set breaks into pieces and the characters are…broken. It also provided the stagehands with the time to rearrange the furniture, change the dinner plates, mop down the blood. There is a lot of blood.

Characters Recast, Yet Unmistakably Mythic

Stone’s modern avatars of the House of Atreus are sharply drawn:

• Chris (Agamemnon) — a man whose corporate decisions have caused real-world devastation. His guilt is both public and private. Throughout the play, we experience the bitterness of his marriage, his new-found pleasure with a new girlfriend and a fresh start, drunkenness and a morbid sense of foreboding. For those ‘in the know’, the bathroom plays a major role.

• Montgomery (Clytemnestra) — American, brittle, and simmering with resentment. Her marriage is collapsing, perhaps because of Isobel, perhaps because of everything. She has several monologues – extended shouts, really – reminiscent both of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and also of Euripides’ Antigone: destined for pain.

• Isobel (Iphigenia) — an eco‑warrior determined to expose her father’s complicity in mass death. Not seen until late in the play, she is more talked about by everyone else – a sort of Odysseus, on a different kind of journey, heard about but not quite seen. Of course, we know that she is the cause of all the upset, to both Chris and to Clytemnestra, but in different ways. It’s a masterstroke on Stone’s part that for this is as much an intrigue as for those that do the original as for those who don’t.

• Alice (Electra) — sweet, introspective and painfully aware she will never measure up to her sister Isobel. But, together with her brother, she makes amends.

• Augustus / Augy (Orestes) — guitar-laying, child of nature, shipped off to Afghanistan, hardened into a PTSD‑scarred soldier who cannot escape the deaths he has caused abroad except by doing more at home.

Other figures drift in and out: Jerome, Montgomery’s lover, with whom she plots the death of her now ex-husband Chris; Chandra, Chris’s new girlfriend, a Cassandra‑figure who sees the future but cannot prevent it – but who leads Augy to the truth of his father’s murder at the hands of his wife; and a detective who acts as a kind of modern chorus, explaining, contextualising and occasionally moralising.

Violence, Loops and the Collapse of Cause and Effect

Stone’s storytelling loops back on itself. Scenes replay with new information; timelines fold; consequences precede causes. The murder of Chris in the bath - Montgomery’s revenge - is gruesome and intimate. The family’s 21st‑birthday gathering becomes a battleground of recriminations. The tape deck, pointed out by Chandra/Cassandra, becomes the key to understanding the family’s past crimes and is a very retro-modern version, maybe, of her ability to tell the future. Perhaps there’s a nod towards Stravinsky / Cocteau’s Oedipus Rex, in which Fate is a tape-recording that cannot be stopped…

And then we return to the beginning.

Chris persuades Isobel to record a social‑media statement exonerating him. She begins, falters, argues and refuses. She runs away, chased after (out of love) by Montgomery into the path of…..

But who really was responsible for her death? And then, for all those others that follow?

Does It Work?

For me, yes - mostly. Stone’s approach is bold, messy and sometimes wilfully opaque, but it captures something essential about the Oresteia: its sense of a world out of joint, a family that cannot help but keep pulling itself apart, and a justice system struggling to emerge from the wreckage.

The realism of the acting - people talking over each other, interrupting, shouting - grounds the myth in recognisable domestic dysfunction. Unlike Hall’s Oresteia, with its pounding rhythms and stately acting – a spectacle in itself – Stone’s Oresteia is barely-concealed bad-tempered domestic squabbling that turns into horrific violence and vengeance. In amongst this, there are even some jokes – light-hearted moments for the audience to breathe. The revolving set is astonishing and almost equal to the performers themselves. And the modern parallels (corporate guilt, environmental activism, PTSD, media manipulation) feel pointed without being heavy‑handed.

It is not a straightforward retelling. It is a kaleidoscope. But perhaps that is the only honest way to stage the Oresteia now.