The Oresteia

The Oresteia as revisited and reinterpreted by the Duck House left me feeling, to be quite frank, a tad ripped off. At 22 dollars a go I found that what I got for my ticket price was hard to justify. The story of the Oresteia is a dark and brutal one. A son avenging a father's death by killing his mother which sparks the whole question of Aeschylus' Oresteia as to whether it is right to take an eye for an eye. Or at least thats the basic gist of the original text. I will start at the very beginning of my tale of woe. No where on my program do I find an acknowledgement of where the raw material was sourced from namely Aeschylus and whoever tranlsted it. Now I grant you that the material is public domain but I found it a bit rude and a profound lack of respect that the source material is in no way acknowledged. I also grew slightly alarmed when I saw the Goddesses of vengence, the women of whom even the Gods became at times afraid of, referred to in a poetic preamble as "a ball of kittens". I resigned to myself at this point that perhaps I should not be so self righteous and be more open minded to new interpretations of classic text... if it can be called a new interpretation. The play started out ok. The three furies bored out of their skulls exiled to the very end of creation with nothing but yesterdays news, a blind, a phone and eachother for company I found to be remeniscent of the tramps in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and as device for driving plot to be quite clever and well founded. The furies then introduce and acknowledge themselves to their audience, a theatrical device that I felt could have been utilised more throughout the show. Indeed once you establish such a device if you don't do it again it leads one to feeling as though you are being ignored. It was at this point of the play that things began to go awry for me. The back story of the tragedy to which the play owes its title became far more important than the actual plot line of the Oresteia. There were lengthy unnecessary silences and pieces of comic business that simply did not come off. When it came time for Orestes to enter the scene many things were glanced over including his mothers disownment of him and the meeting between Orestes and his sister Electra. Having been introduced to Orestes only a few moments before we then see him murdering Aegisthus and his mother a scene which should have been full of tension but was completely lacking. Now the play began to get really blurry for me. Appearing in ghost form Clytmnesta appeals to two of the three furies for assistance in avenging her death and without the flicker of an eyelid they obey and proceed to torture Orestes with some rolled up newspaper... In the next moment Athena makes an appearance and demands a trial, A trial in which we only hear from the prosecutors and nothing from the defence. Then there's suddenly a phone call with the verdict, not guilty! The furies are banished and we arrive back at our start point, all of which seemed to take less time than the aforementioned back story. The performances relied too heavily on "being funny" an effect which in the end made the whole event feel more akin to an embarassed pantomime. The performers were loud and lacked sincerity (with an exception of some moments of Alissa Claessens performance as Orestes) and failed to hold my attention. I found the lighting to be more a distraction than an enhancement to the text. I thought the space was well utilised though I felt the "newspaper carpet" to be highly under utilised and in the end did become more of a distraction than it did an enhancement. I felt the use of singing, rhythm and music throughout the play to be a wonderful breath of fresh air. I was sad to hear it only happen a handful of times though it really did help to add colour to an otherwise stark theatre outing. Now comes to the hard part because despite all that I have said I still recommend that you go and see this show. Why? For one, you may very well disagree with me and i'm sure many of you do. Two, it was nice to see a theatre company that's not afraid to revisit the classics. It was something different and although for me it didn't work it was an interesting experiment in reinterpreting texts that have become so fundamentally a part of who we are that we don't even realise it. My final reason is that when you see the show it will prompt you to feel something and have an opinion about what you saw, which is arguably the whole point of theatre, to make you feel something. In that regard for me the show was an overwhelming success. Finally thinking it over, perhaps $22.00 is alot to ask but then again how often can you go out these days without spending at least that much. I think it cost me as much last time I drove to the end of my street... Please forgive my awful spelling and grammer but its late and I wanted to put something out there while the memory was still fresh. ~Garreth Bradshaw Lastly, I can safely say that if I did not know anything of the Oresteia or Greek myth I would have been lost from the very beginning as was my friend who I bought along to see the show.