The Oresteia is, its director concedes, a dusty play. A dearth of revivals and eponymous Freudian complexes have led to limited renown. Each of its three constituent plays is too slight to be satisfying alone, but performed together they would be unwieldy and prohibitively long. Myles O’Gorman has steered a straight course between this respective Scylla and Charybdis by opting to cut the trilogy radically into a single three-act play. When I hinted that the self-contained narrative arcs of each act might make for jagged, choppy drama, O’Gorman countered that his fusion brings out the play’s broader development: the breaking of a cycle of revenge and the establishment of Athenian democracy.

The atmosphere in the rehearsal room is relaxed and focused, despite many of the cast’s extensive commitments. Many actors were also involved in last week’s ADC main show Piranha Heights, which featured a stiflingly suburban set that loomed with rich metaphorical resonance over the stage. All the actors had strongly individualised characterisations, even when playing an entire chorus (Maya Yousif). Francesca Bertoletti, as Athena, has an ethereal poise which marks her out from the comparatively rigid postures of the earthbound characters. The lack of a large-scale chorus is compensated for by keeping the entire cast on stage at all times. Rather than standing around with the bus-stop placidity of a Brechtian GCSE performance, they chat and react to the action on stage. The cast’s interactions struck me as particularly natural and constructive: people would often ask ‘how should I react?’ when rehearsing. 

Based on my experience with school theatre, I would have said it is seldom a pleasure to converse with lighting designers. However, Johnny King eviscerated my prejudices: he is not interested in ‘tech for the sake of tech’. He is excited to work on a show which is unusual amongst ADC mains for being minimalistic in set and tech: the focus is very much on the actors. This does not, however, diminish King’s role: his cold, stark lighting serves to heighten scenes’ intense horror, while ‘whiteouts’ between scenes unsettle and disorientate the audience. Whereas actors focus primarily on their scene and characters, King relishes tech’s ‘direct’ impact on the audience. Exactly how this plays out in the (numerous) murder scenes I will not attempt to describe, but King mentions that O’Gorman was “fond of the word ‘visceral’” in his lighting brief.

There’s always a danger that ADC main shows can pander to a thespian clique, and indeed many of The Oresteia’s cast have worked with O’Gorman before. However, if anything, this only strengthens the team’s cohesiveness. The number of freshers involved (Annabelle Hayworth, Jamie Sayers and Gabriel Wheble) testifies to the openness of the play’s casting, and no one seemed left out.

O’Gorman has considerably revised an old verse translation of the play. Jamie Sayers (Orestes) conceded that the ‘archaic’ language posed difficulties, but the cast and director ensured that the meaning was always at the forefront of the actors’ mind. Over the Christmas vacation the cast compiled their own modern prose translation of the script. I regret that these lines (e.g. “so I hearkened my good sexy self to Athens”) were not incorporated into the performed script. During rehearsal, if an actor started speaking in stilted ‘verse talk’, O’Gorman told them to put down their scripts and improvise. When they picked the scripts back up, they brought the ease of their improvisation to the verse.

O’Gorman explained that the dense verse creates an ironic counterpoint with the minimalist, modern set (I won’t spoil it, but it involves soil and a large altar, and aims to draw the audience’s attention to theatrical artifice) and costumes. One interpretation might be that the interplay of complex language and simple set is mimetic of the act of reading words on a white page. O’Gorman is fully aware of the metatextual implications of the gods’ intervention: they predestine human action like the script predestines the actions of the play. Intellectual onanism aside, The Oresteia is sure to ‘shake off the dust’ from a text all too often confined to academic circles; to bring the dynamism of theatre to a play all too often read and not visualised; to let the words breathe.

The Oresteia is on at the ADC Theatre at 7.45pm, 30 January-3 February