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| ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: sergius 01:35 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| Leaving the Park Avenue Armory, someone behind me said: "That was (pause) not your mother's Aeschylus." Whatever your mother's Aeschylus may look like, Orestes' mother's looks defiantly aggrieved but still crushed. Robert Icke tries to wrangle a feminist take on the ORESTEIA to mixed effect. He underscores the story's gender biases and inequities, but Clytemnestra, as per Aeschylus, is still hung out to dry by masculine authority. (And by another woman! See Graham's CLYTEMNESTRA for a more persuasive feminist interpretation--and a superb distillation--of the ORESTEIA.). Icke is a cerebral director. He's young and boldly adventurous. And he's clearly learned some things--pervasive underscoring, video tracking--from Ivo van Hove, though he employs them more judiciously and so more effectively. From what I've seen so far (1984, THE DOCTOR), his work advances ideas sometimes to the brink of intellectual triumphalism; everything is calculated and in its right place. Icke makes a spectacle of his command. This is never less than interesting--sometimes it's thrilling--but it's often emotionally alienating, too. Here, the actors occasionally punch through the scrim of Icke's punctilious craft, and when they do, most notably in the scenes between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, the play burns with, yes, pity and terror. Icke gives us something to think about, Aeschylus something to feel. | |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: singleticket 08:44 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: ORESTEIA Last Night - sergius 01:35 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| I agree that Icke uses video to better dramatic effect than van Hove. The use he made of it in 1984 was chilling. But I doubt Icke learned it from van Hove or van Hove came to use video tracking before any other number of stage directors. I saw ORESTEIA with Williams and I preferred both Icke's Armory HAMLET and his London 1984 but I remember being perhaps too tired to give his ORESTEIA a fair hearing. My take on it then was it was an attempt to bring a contemporary audience into the power of myth by de-mythologizing the mythic which I suppose is a kind of mythophobia. |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Last Edit: aislestorm 06:50 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| Posted by: aislestorm 06:50 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: ORESTEIA Last Night - sergius 01:35 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| I was there last night as well. I found the first act to be beautifully done. Startling in its power, after the end of that act, I expected the next two acts to be equally as thrilling. They weren’t. In the first act, Anastasia Hille was a force to be reckoned with, reminding me of a young Diana Rigg or Emma Thompson. By the third act, she’d turned into a mediocre Tilda Swinton and all the electricity had gone out of the play. The trial framing device was like “Equus”-light but not as engrossing. I wanted to like Luke Treadaway, but he just never DID anything. I stayed awake and focused, but it became quite a slog. | |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 07:14 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: re: ORESTEIA Last Night - aislestorm 06:50 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| Crucially, the first act is (an uncredited) Euripedes, and the next two (actually three) acts are Aeschylus. | |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: aleck 04:50 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: ORESTEIA Last Night - sergius 01:35 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| I was there last night as well. After seeing the fantastic Hamlet at the Amory a few weeks, I was expecting something equally dazzling. Well, to begin with, Icke had a better writer to work with when doing Hamlet. But the performers were committed and the staging was mostly exciting but sometimes confusing. All in all, you knew you were in the presence of ART. For me, I'd prefer a good production of Mourning Becomes Electra. |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: lonlad 05:16 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: re: ORESTEIA Last Night - aleck 04:50 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| Interesting: in London, I far preferred the raw, elemental power of ORESTEIA, capped by Lia Williams's titanic performance, to the rather tricksy Hamlet, watchable though Andrew Scott always was and is. Could you hear Anastasia Hille? She is known here for often being inaudible. Williams is back onstage in the autumn in Ibsen's JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN at the Bridge with Clare Higgins and Simon Russell Beale - bespoke casting if ever I saw it. | |
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| re: ORESTEIA Last Night | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 05:28 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: re: ORESTEIA Last Night - lonlad 05:16 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| Everyone in the show is wearing a mic (you have to be in that space), and Hille is excellent in the part. I had the opposite reaction to Sergius: I felt Icke was doing a lot of the Van Hove aesthetic without the rigor and attention to detail we see in Ivo's work, so the evening became a series of half-conceived gestures that were individually interesting but didn't add up to a whole. Add to that an M. Night Shyamalan twist and the fact that Icke adds in an entire Euripedes play to Aeshcylus' opus, and we have a show that plays fast and loose with the Greeks to little emotional or intellectual purpose. I do agree with Sergius about one thing: despite how much Icke deviates from the original, he still falls into the dramaturgical traps of "The Eumenides", so the whole thing turns into "Law & Order: Misogyny"in that final hour. The main plus: it comes in about 20 minutes shorter than promised, at 3 hours 35 minutes, and it's rarely boring. |
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| re: ORESTEIA Sat Mat | |
| Posted by: stan 08:07 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
| In reply to: re: ORESTEIA Last Night - Singapore/Fling 05:28 pm EDT 07/30/22 | |
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| It should have been wrenching, but it was mainly interesting. Whereas some directors, like Sam Gold, reimagine the ancient classics, like Hamlet, without major changes in the texts but often come up with terrible productions. Many plays, especially Hamlet, get totally new works using the plot outlines with the knowledge that the familiarity of these masterworks can allow their imaginations to sometimes produce a Pulitzer without too much original thinking. This Oresteia was virtually a new work, under the shroud of a truly great play. I didn't mind. I took it as an original show (G-d how I, too, love Mourning Becomes Electra). I was not emotionally engaged, which seems impossible with this tragedy. I saw Iphigenia in Aulis (by Euripides) with Irene Papas and Mitchell Ryan (this is the version I've reported on previously where Ryan was so drunk he left the stage, vomited, returned, apologized, and went on with the play while the embraces with his doomed daughter and the mighty Clytemnestra were strained). It was directed by Michael Cacoyanis and was superb. It was also enough. Your heart was broken and you left the theater. Then I could see Electra (Euripides or Sophocles) and forget about The Eumenides -- in which the justification of saving Orestes was that belief that semen is like a seed with an already formed homunculus and the woman's womb is its fertile garden (or so I was told?). Also, I was annoyed that Aegesis was played by the same actor who was Agamemnon. As well as explaining his relationship to the Queen (who really didn't see all that Queenly) And I wanted to see more of Cassandra (as long as you're rewriting what we're seeing) -- who doesn't love a character who gets no respect even though she knows EXACTLY what's happening next. | |
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