There is an elephant in the room here, and it’s nothing to do with the giant winged golden phallus that’s casually trundled out for the curtain call (though anybody not au fait with the more arcane details of Ancient Greek theatre may wonder if they’ve accidentally stumbled into 'The Twilight Zone' at this point).
Nope, the elephant in the room is ‘Oresteia’, the definite article-free other Londpn adaptation of Aeschylus’s millennia-old trilogy about revenge and redemption. It is a completely transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime piece of theatre, probably the best thing that’s been on the stage this year, and it’s bloody hard not to think about about it when watching the Globe’s more trad version.
And this is unfair, because Rory Mullarkey’s take is really trying to do something different, and it largely does it well. His pithy text and Adele Thomas’s production are very much ‘the Globe’ take on Aeschylus, a vivid, boisterous, mordantly funny take that cleaves closer than ‘Oresteia’ to the look and feel of the Athenian stage while indubitably doing its own thing.
In an ancient Argos that looks to have been styled on Depression-era America, Clytemnestra and her grumbling, bickering chorus of townsfolk are awaiting the return of her king, Agamemnon, the decade-long Trojan War now concluded. He comes back… and she gorily dismembers him as revenge for sacrificing their daughter to the gods at the war’s outset.
In ‘Oresteia’ this was all told with a haunting realist elegance. Here, it’s, er, not. There are bits when everybody starts singing cod-operatically. There are lots of skintight gold outfits. There’s little sense of character development, but a string of short, mad, brilliant minor roles: Naana Agyei-Ampadu’s ballsy, gold leotard-clad Cassandra; Katy Stephens’s twitchy, gory, charming Clytemnestra; Trevor Fox’s completely fucking insane Aegisthus. And then there’s the enormous golden penis at the end. It’s a good golden penis.
But as to the whole three-hour play… it feels more like a homage to the wildness of the ancient Greek festival of Dionysia than a coherent or emotionally forceful work, a series of fun set pieces that stimulate the senses but never sear the soul… unlike a certain other production I should probably stop mentioning.