Articles by Natalia Romanova

Where: Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London, N1 1TA
When: 29th May-18th July 2015, Evenings: 7pm, Saturday matinees: 1pm
How long: 3h40 with pauses/an interval of 5m, 15m and 3m
How much: £10-£38
Tickets from: the Almeida web site or by calling the box office on 020 7359 4404

Back in the day, a mere 2,500 years ago, Greek tragedies used to be performed in groups of four: a comical satyr play preceded by three regular tragedies – some happy, some sad, despite the name. Those three tragedies were frequently but not always trilogies, but unfortunately only one of these linked trilogies survives: The Oresteia. It was written by the first of the great Athenian playwrights, Aeschylus, and dramatises a story already well known at that time – the story of the great Trojan general Agamemnon, his return home to Greece after the war, his death and the subsequent avenging of that death.

I say well known, but between Homer, Hesiod and other even earlier traditions, it’s not quite clear if there was ever one definite story, with versions surviving in which Agamemnon is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, her lover Aegisthus or both of them. Why do they kill him? Perhaps there was an enmity between Aegisthus’ family and Agamemnon’s. Perhaps it’s because he brought back a Trojan slave girl, Cassandra, with him. Or perhaps it’s because he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia – or was it Iphimede? – to Artemis to atone for sacrilege against her sacred deer and to ensure good winds to sail for Troy.

It is Aeschylus’ own later elaboration on those stories that are the best known. In Agamemnon, the eponymous ruler returns to his kingdom after 10 years in Troy, where he’s killed almost immediately in his bath by Clytemnestra. In The Libation Bearers, their son Orestes returns years later from exile and in collusion with his sister Electra – the subject of her own plays by both Sophocles and Euripides – he conspires to murder his mother. Matricide having been committed, the gods of injustice, the Furies, want their vengeance and in The Eumenides, only the intervention of Athena and her establishment of trials by jury are enough to stop them and to establish a new, kindlier system of jurisprudence.

And then in Proteus, the companion satyr play that no longer exists, following the Trojan War, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus and his wife Helen (of Troy) run aground on the island of the shape-changing sea god Proteus, somewhere off the coast of Egypt, where they are chased around by satyrs looking for sexy time.

Now, the Almeida is mounting a season of Greek tragedies this year dedicated to establishing their relevance to a modern audience and as you can tell from that summary above, as delightful as it all is to people like me, not everyone is going to find the original texts quite as accessible, particularly since a lot of the trilogy is about the changing relationship between mortals and a pantheon of gods in which very few people now believe.

So in this, the first Oresteia of the year, we have a somewhat freeform adaptation of the original text, updated for the present day. And somewhat surprisingly for a trilogy, it comes in four parts.