| 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. |
