Simon Stone’s The Oresteia lays bare the trouble with dismembering – the remembering.
Hell hath no fury like a mother betrayed. The Greeks understood the power of maternal love
like no one else – not as a fuzzy, domestic feeling, but charged by the furious instinct to
destroy anything that threatens or harms the beloved child.
Simon Stone’s production of The Oresteia is a modern-day update of Aeschylus’ trilogy
of tragedies, condensed into an unrelenting three hours. Moving backwards and forwards
between past and present day, Stone’s version masterfully reveals the story bit by bit, giving
it the edge of a crime thriller. The play starts on the 21st birthday of the elusive Isabelle, the
daughter of Christopher (David Morrissey) and Montie (Mary-Louise Parker). Fast forward
and we learn we will never meet Isabelle – she died on that day, and Christopher is to blame.
Her death sets the events in motion, leading to the unravelling of mother, father and two
siblings, Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Isabelle’s twin Alice (Rosie Sheehy). Their
modern-day palace is a glass-walled, sleek box of a house in Sevenoaks with floodlights up
the walls; the king is burly businessman Christopher, the head of Middletech, a defence tech
company involved in murky dealings. Wealth reflects off every polished surface, and hanger-
on cousin Jerome (John Macmillan) is shamed by Christopher for buying Bollinger rather
than Dom Pérignon (don’t worry, he gets his own back.)
The glass box revolves as we peer into each room, where another little wound is being cut
until the stage is gory with trauma. Glynn-Carney and Parker are particularly brilliant in that
most Greek of dysfunctional relationships – the broken mother-son bond. There is a moment
where Augie returns from the army after years away, cast out of the house. Montie comes
back from her Pilates (the necessary counterbalance to the drug addiction of a Home Counties
almond mother) to find him in his room, wan and pale with PTSD. The audience gazes
upwards, and the lighting seems to soften for a moment as they connect across the chasm of
private pain. The connection refracts again, but it was there.
Stone is brilliant at points of contrast like these, where both his direction and writing soften
the overwhelming horror of the story through humour or bursts of hope. There were moments
of uproarious laughter from the audience, as the mask of tragedy flipped to comedy with
effortless ease due to the superb acting. There was also some good luxuriating within
wordplay (‘dismember…remember’), which luckily does fit with the tortured characters.
The only moment where the luxuriating went too far was Montie describing her dream of
flying across New York as a winged, taloned creature. There is nothing more boring than
listening to someone talking about their dream, no matter how much psychological torture it
reveals. Nonetheless, the conjuring of the monstrous shadow of a Fury within the mother
figure is a brilliant touch. Montie’s shoulder blades press stark against the glass wall, and you
can almost see the wings beginning to sprout through.
Stone has taken on a forbidding task in this latest production – but, similarly to his 2023
production of Phaedra, there is a messiness that is ultimately unsatisfying. Certain plot
choices feel random and slightly contrived, and the ending in particular is more like a neat
bow being tied on a pile of misery rather than the final explosion it is meant to be.
Nonetheless, his version reveals the tender sinews of the psyche we prefer to look away from,
laying them raw and exposed, and the emotional complexity brought out of the script by the
cast is breathtaking.
The Oresteia is at the Bridge Theatre until the 19 th September. Tickets for this performance were kindly provided by SeatPlan to facilitate coverage and review. Link to tickets here.