Oresteia

The Oresteia begins with a father deciding that a daughter is a price worth paying, and then follows what that decision does to everyone left behind. A wife waits ten years and does not forgive. A son comes home and has to choose between two unbearable duties.

Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia to get his fleet moving; Clytemnestra kills him for it when he returns; Orestes kills her in turn and is pursued for it. The story is a chain of justified murders in which every act of justice creates the next crime, and it ends by asking whether a court can do what revenge cannot.

Simon Stone wrote this version, drawing on Aeschylus and later treatments, and sets it in the present: a recognisable contemporary family who wake up inside the myth and cannot find the way out. The dialogue is modern and domestic, and the horror arrives through ordinary rooms rather than through ritual.

What the piece is really about is inheritance — the way violence, grievance and silence get handed down through a family until nobody can remember who started it. It offers very little comfort, and it treats the audience as a jury for a decision that has no clean answer.

It suits audiences who want classical tragedy in plain speech and at full force. It works best live, where the accumulation across an evening, one act of justice at a time, is exactly the effect the structure was built to produce. Nothing in it is decorative: every scene is there because somebody has decided something they cannot undo.