Festival Theatre
Oresteia: This Restless House
Royal Lyceum Theatre
Neil Cooper
five stars
WHEN Zinnie Harris's three-part re-imagining of Aeschylus's epochal family tragedy first appeared in Dominic Hill's production at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in 2016, its scale in terms of staging and imaginative breadth was stunning. More than a year on, this Edinburgh International Festival revival of the Citz's production in association with the National Theatre of Scotland is an even more expansive experience.
This may be partly to do with its condensing of the three plays into one four and a half hour sitting. Largely, however, it is to do with the sheer bravura of the exercise, as generations of damaged goods wrestle with the hand-me-down baggage of a situation their appetite for casual slaughter has created. From the moment Pauline Knowles' vivacious Clytemnestra vamps her way into the crumbling working men's club that passes for a palace where a Last of the Summer Wine-style chorus holds court, the tone is set for a discordant psycho-sexual morass of revenge killings.
Clytemnestra clings to her dead daughter Iphigenia for strength as much as her own sanity, as she enacts revenge on George Anton's all-conquering Agamemnon. The second part is even more manic, as Olivia Morgan's neuroses-ridden daddy's girl Electra squares up to her mother. The final part lurches into even deeper waters, as Electra's troubled psychiatrist Audrey faces up to demons of her own.
This is played out on Colin Richmond's dilapidated set, littered with musical detritus with which the cast smash, crash and bash out Nikola Kodjabashia's banshee-like live score. Generic boundaries collapse in a thrilling howl of a play that never flinches from the extremes that sired its story into harrowing life.
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