Oresteia

Review of Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Park Avenue Armory

I knew I wanted to see Oresteia at the Park Avenue Armory because I was curious about how this was playing in tandem with Hamlet, which I had already seen my previous trip to New York City. And so, when I was preparing to head up to the city in August, I purchased a ticket to Oresteia through TDF.

It was cheaper than my Hamlet rush ticket (that was $49, this was $41 with fees), and they gave me a better seat. I was put in row G to the far right, in the seat next to the aisle. I still could see the entire stage with no obstructions, which I had figured because I sat in a similar seat during Hamlet.

There’s one thing you should know before I begin this informal review: I had never read the classic version of Oresteia going into this. I am unfamiliar with Greek tragedies outside of the basics, but it seems like a lot of the people around me, judging from their conversations, were also unfamiliar. Icke goes for modernizations in this repertory, which has sadly ended by the time this is published, so you’ll find the language updated but the core stories intact.

A family tragedy amplified to the maximum.

Let us begin the core part of this review.

The Story

If you are unfamiliar with the story of the Trojan War, do not fear. I don’t think you really need to know how that story goes down, but knowing it in advance might help you out a little bit. The original Oresteia is set in three different parts, but they are all smashed together for this four-hour performance. There are four breaks throughout, which is clever disguised through a fourth wall break. The oracle, looking into the audience, says we will convene for a break and the timers are set for the fifteen minute breaks.

Agamemnon, the ruler of the kingdom that won the Trojan War, creates tension in the home when his advisors come to him and say that he needs to sacrifice his daughter in order to win the war. One of the advisors, which is his brother, is particularly adamant that he kill his own daughter, and, eventually, Agamemnon gives in to their demands. Clytemnestra, his wife, discovers what he is about to do and is obviously upset, but Agamemnon goes through with it, creating a disturbing scene where his daughter says she’s sleepy and keeps twitching as she’s dying.

They win the war, but there’s a price to be paid. The brother is killed in action, and Clytemnestra, now having gone slightly mad with grief, passively confronts Agamemnon. Their son, Orestes, and the daughter, Electra, are picking up the pieces of what happened previously, but they have no idea what actually happened.

Agamemnon also brings home a young girl, Cassandra, that exposes that everyone will die after an unearthly scream. She runs across the stage wildly saying that this essentially is the product of war and sacrifice, and that Agamemnon’s time will be up soon.

The night the father returns home, Clytemnestra murders him in the bathtub and Cassandra in the hallway, creating an entirely new cycle of hate and despair. She takes on his brother as her new lover, and Orestes, now driven mad himself, seeks to murder his mother for revenge.

As it turns out, Electra, in this adaptation, is not real. She’s a figment of Orestes’ imagination and while he thinks that Electra was the one who murdered their mother, he actually did it himself. The final act Icke’s version then boils down to a strange trial that the actors, who apparently were role-playing the murder in the courtroom, determines that because Orestes is a male, he will be let off the hook. His mother, however, is demonized for being a woman.

The Stage

I knew the basic setup of Icke’s two plays because I had seen Hamlet beforehand, but I was blown away by how the stage was used here. The actors truly dominate the tiny space they’re given in a way that I found to be brilliant. The entirety of the story is set in the upper portion of the stage, which is cut in two by a glass divider. That divider, in Hamlet, serves as a hallway and it serves the same purpose here.

The glass becomes see-through in certain parts of the play, making an intimate scene, such as when Clytemnestra kills her husband, become so much more real. She then takes his bloodied corpse and drags it to the front of the stage, leaving bloody red streaks all over the previously sterile white floor. However, most of the tale boils down to the dinner table that the family once gathered around, which is broken apart into pieces and put back together when needed.

Something that was also really haunting is that the actors never leave the stage. When we cut to audience breaks and people get up to go to the bathroom, they linger on the stage, frozen in the scene that they were left in. They look horrified, depressed, or the body of Agamemnon is left behind as workers come to scrub up the blood.

They never broke character once when they did this, which was pretty impressive to me. One of the most brilliant moments, however, was after Clytemnestra confronts of her husband and she stands on the table with her hands outstretch, light beaming down on her and papers descending from the sky.

Like Hamlet, use of video and technology is incorporated in throughout the play. Because Agamemnon is a state leader and this is set in contemporary times, there’s camera interviews that are projected on the screens throughout the Armory. One of the most unique things about this play, though, is that they project countdowns throughout declaring when each character is going to die. When they do die, it is put on the screen above the actors, declaring their time of death in the current moment EST.

A little detail I noticed, too, was the music that was scattered throughout. There’s a persistent ticking noise scattered throughout, as well as a chorus-like noise. The chorus noise was pretty haunting and spooky, which added to the overall ambiance, while the ticking really set in the feeling that time was running out for each of these characters.

Overall Thoughts

I absolutely adored this production until we got to the court scene. I thought that if the play just ended with the death of the mother and Orestes realizing what had happened, it would have been fine.

It’s way too meta and forced to make this all become a stimulation happening in the court of law, then provide poetic thoughts about patriarchy and that women are blamed in this society. I think we spend enough time with them to come to these conclusions on our own, which is why I would not be mad if the final arc were simply cut out.

Besides that, I thought this was incredible and so did the people around me. The girls behind me kept gushing every break about how this was so much better than expected, and so were the people in front.

The acting is absolutely top tier, even from the kids performing in accents that aren’t their own. Having known nothing about the original, I genuinely enjoyed this a lot up until the trial. I’m glad I got to see it before leaving town!