BIG plays these: the Freudian nightmare of Oedipus the King (Sophocles), in which our hero realises he's killed his dad and shacked up with his mum; the fraternal squabbling of seven against Thebes (Aeschylus), in which brother sets upon brother in a fatal power struggle; and the public versus private tragedy of Antigone (Sophocles) in which a sister's need to grieve is at odds with a king's need to rule.
They've survived the millennia for a reason - their themes are at society's core, and we don't need this underlined. Yet so eager are the young actors in Mariela Stevenson's Factional Theatre production to emote that for much of this condensed Greek trilogy they lose sight of the causes and give us only the effects. We don't need to be shown grief, we need to feel it.
It's not that Stevenson's not trying. Performed on a sandpit of a set, her production presents a very physical chorus, all fluttering hand gestures somewhere between prayer and possession, dancing one minute, collapsing the next. Sometimes such rehearsal-room exercises make sense of the text; as often as not they obscure it.
In the first play, and the lightning-fast second, there is too much Serious Acting but then in the final part, on steps Beth Marshall as Antigone and Mark Coleman as Creon, she with surefooted musicality, he with square-shouldered linguistic control, each a formidable opponent and at last we touch these eternal passions first-hand.
By the end, the Serious Acting has returned, but not before we've had a compelling glimpse of what Stevenson could have done with a more experienced company.
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