The Oresteia: Agamemnon (Peter Hall, 1983)

 "I'm no more a breaker of bed-bond than, as a woman, I wield a man's weapon..."

I did The Oresteia at University... some twenty years ago. Watching this first instalment of the trilogy- Peter Hall, for the National Theatre, in 1983, now happily available with subtitles on YouTube- I'm reminded how little I remember of the details, alhough this is a very different translation from what we used in the module I studied, covering ancient Greek drama in translations for we English students as offered by the Classics Department.

This production is the first in a trilogy that I will be alternating with The Mandalorian before returning to Sapphire & Steel. It's an extraordinary production. For a start, it's made by a supergroup of culture as it existed in 1983. Aeschylus' words are translated by the superlative poet Tony Harrison, a working class lad from Leeds who managed to get the Classical education he needed to insulge his natural poetic talent as possibly the finest poet this country produced in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It's directed by Peter Hall. And the soundscape is by Harrison Birtwistle, the greatest British composer of the twentieth century and a man whose delightfully atonal compositions never trouble the Daily Mail reading acolytes of Classical FM.

The result of this is a fusion of the very ancient and very modern which fuses magnificently. On the one hand it's a brutally authentic production of Aescyhlus' play, from the very alien culture that is the Athens of the 4th century BC. The all-male actors- John Normington excels as Cassandra- and the masks worn by all players transport us back to Athens in its Golden Age and how theatre was done in those distant and murky days, by people we cannot understand. The masks, in particular, make me glad for the subtitles.

Yet the words are poetry you can get drunk on. I know little of poetic style in ancient Greece, but Tony Harrison's translation, with its kennings and alliteration, calls to mind the warlike muscularity of Old English poetry, and mixes cultural allusions with the demotic and, indeed, the earthy.

The masks, and the rigidity of the metre, are perfectly ec hoed by Birtwistle's unremittingly atonal score which, alongside Harrison's words, fuse ancient and modern with profound effect.

It's striking, perhaps, how much of this play is taken up with philosophical and actually quite rich philosophical discourse about Troy and about the costs, and pointlessness, of war, before stuff actually happens and Clytemnestra- offstage- does the bloody deed and avenges poor Iphygenia. As a father of a perfect daughter, I side with her.

This is exquisite. And more is to come...