Oresteia
ORESTEIA, Wharf 1, Sydney theatre Company, 1 June-4 July, 2010. Images: Brett Boardman.
COMPARISONS are supposed to be odious and you may think so in this instance but it’s difficult not to think about Women of Troy, the 2008 collaboration between writer-adapter Tom Wright and director Barrie Kosky, in relation to Wright’s Oresteia; and the comparison is not a happy one.
For instance, it’s impossible to imagine Kosky permitting a savage act of matricide by means of a litre bottle of Farmer’s Best; not unless he actually intended to turn Aeschylus’s tragedy into a rather inane comedy, that is. There might be an argument for Freudian symbolism as son does in mummy in great gouts of spurting white liquid, but again, not really – when the end effect is risible rather than appalling.
The production is beset with misfiring imagery and text; power and poetry are notably missing in action. The night I was there (not opening night) there were many instances of out-of-place laughter, giggles and snorts of disbelief. The laughter wasn’t the nervous kind – stirred by horror or distaste, but simply the response of a human being to the unintentionally ridiculous and hilarious.
Wright has taken the trilogy of plays – The Oresteia – and condensed them into two halves of approximately an hour-plus each. The result is much anaemic exposition – 20 minutes to get the first act underway, for instance. And throughout, long dreary speeches, delivered in the sing-song style that smacks of cluelessness, to achieve that most irritating theatrical cop-out: telling the audience about all the exciting, violent, vivid and important things that are happening elsewhere.
There’s a lot of blood of course, as well as the ejaculating milk moment, but there is no tangible conviction to be felt in the murder, nothing visceral in the mayhem. It would require a team of determined draft horses to draw one in to the plight of these people – and sitting on the sidelines just doesn’t cut it when the willful destruction of family, love and hope is supposed to be the central concern of the play.
On the up-side, Wharf 1’s space has been reconfigured for the production, by Alice Babidge to resemble a miniature ancient Greek theatre: flat rear wallcontaining the three main exit/entrances (disguised as lifts with hissing doors of Delphic opacity) and a virtual semi-circle of seating for the audience, which puts most in close contact with the “action”.
The action is performed by the Residents – the STC’s new troupe – Alice Ansara, Cameron Goodall, Ursula Mills, Julia Ohannessian, Zindzi Okenyo, Richard Pyros, Sophie Ross, Takhi Saul and Brett Stiller. And it has to be said that it’s Pyros who finally manages to inject into the show something approaching electricity and the sense that he knows what he’s doing. This is not to say that the rest could not and have not (in previous productions they certainly have) so the nonfulfillment of promise here inevitably comes back to the material they have to work with, and the direction: tragic. At the same time, I notice my friend and colleague John McCallum, writing in The Australian, thinks Oresteia is one of the best things he’s seen in a long time. So there you are.
