In the final years of his tumultuous life, poet laureate Ted Hughes turned to the classics, producing translations and palimpsests of Ovid, Euripides and Aeschylus. It's Hughes' version of Agamemnon, part one of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, that Connor Mulley has wisely chosen as his text for the production that graces Magdalen Chapel this week, in a near-sacrilegious bloodbath of pre-Christian polytheistic poetry.
I am no classics scholar, and I can't tell you whether Ted Hughes' translation captures the tone and spirit of the original. What I can tell you is that it certainly makes for better theatre than the scores of over-respectful editions promulgated by desiccated academic perfectionists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This is ancient Greece sieved through modern Yorkshire. There are Myrmidons on the streets of Mytholmroyd. Their music is honest and down-to-earth, and it may never have been so beautiful to an English ear before.
It's not surprising that Hughes felt so attracted to these epic tales of tragic death booming through the dynasties. His own life was dominated by death and guilt. Sylvia Plath, his Clytemnestra and Cassandra rolled into one, took her own life while they were married. Hughes killed himself in 1999. And ten years afterwards, his son Nicholas, a lifelong sufferer with depression, committed suicide at the young age of 47. Aeschylus himself would have been proud.
For a play that was already a thousand years old by the time Beowulf was written down, I guess spoilers are by now a bit redundant. So, for those of you who don't know: in order to win the Trojan War, Agamemnon had to appease the Gods by killing his own daughter Iphigenia. When he returns from ten years adventuring, with his slave/rape victim/prophetess Cassandra in tow, his wife Clytemnestra pretends to welcome him home but then, working with her lover Aegisthus, kills both her husband and her clairvoyant rival in revenge. It is an inescapable cycle of vengeance and moral justification (and, one hardly needs to point out, its contemporary relevance is seldom far away).
Agamemnon's wronged, seething wife Clytemnestra, played with dominant, uncompromising clarity by a brilliant Hope Healy, is the centerpiece of this vision of the fallout from the Trojan War. Her ironic commentary makes her the true Chorus to the mythical events of the story. Her bitterness ('He butchered my daughter like somebody else's goat') is visceral. The scripted Chorus, a group of three Greek women, become more like confidantes, challenging and remonstrating with the central characters, forcing them to defend and explain themselves. This Chorus is like local news, full of gossip and outrage. Clytemnestra has her eyes on immortality.
Connor Mulley's production is a striking balance of old and new. On the new side, its muscular script feels as fresh as a birth-spattered babe on the floor of the Chapel. And it has some early sequences of haunting film, projected on a sheet slung between the columns, that give metaphorical, visual life to the Chorus's extended exposition. Maggots, industry, dead octopuses... "things" reproducing. These nightmare video sections recall similar scenes in Raphael da Silva's production of Pinter's The Lover a few weeks ago and, wait, there is Raphael, playing the drums. I knew I'd seen that dead octopus before. If productions can re-use the same chaise longue from the prop store time after time, I see no reason not to re-use these terrifying and evocative video sequences. They set the tone of horror and poetry fused in pain.
On the more traditional side, Mulley's interpretation is consciously static and statuesque. The three members of the Chorus (Phoebe McCambridge, Isabelle Horrocks-Taylor and Tali Appleton giving an astonishing display of synchronised voice and memory) speak - declaim is more accurate - in a near-monotone and in perfect time with each other, almost like a primary school nativity tableau. This isn't lack of imagination; it's deliberate anti-naturalism. Each character, in their allotted time, stands centre-stage and speaks to a point in the middle distance. They are not real people, but mouthpieces for ancient wisdom. It's a powerful and effective technique, if perhaps a little short on excitement.
Agamemnon (Toma Oregel-Chaumont) looks, sounds (and behaves) disturbingly like a young Klaus Kinski. He leers and preens, his skintight leggings bedecked with razor-sharp studs around his buttocks, bespeaking the depths of toxic masculinity. He's quite a mesmerising presence, but I'm not surprised his wife stabbed him to death. And Cassandra (Tyra Marianna Dreise) is the one character freed from the stately poise of the others. She screams, runs around, addresses members of the audience directly, and throws herself on the floor - all while wearing a matching set of satin underwear that definitely wasn't in the original script but provides the perfect contrast of objectified femininity. What they all have in common is powerful verse speaking and a sense of dignity, poise and presence.
I'm not sure whether the Chapel setting is more of a help or a hindrance to this Agamemnon. The high-Church paraphernalia and Christian imagery don't sit naturally with the invocations to Zeus and Athena, and the narrow strip of performable space at the entrance to the nave feels cramped and restrictive. On the other hand, the grand scale and imposing solemnity of the place add to the gravitas that fuels this production. And the music, which is as haunting and evanescent as a zephyr on the flanks of Mount Olympus, fills the space with atmosphere.
The last time I saw Agamemnon, it was Peter Hall's historic 1982 production at the National Theatre: all three plays performed in one day by a cast who were wearing expressionless Greek masks and yet seemed to burn with character based on the slightest tilt or turn of a head. It was an unforgettable experience, and Hall, in his own way, was trying to do the same thing as the current production: to unite the ancient, statuesque presence of Aeschylus' original with a modern style that speaks to a 20th-, or now 21st-, Century audience. Tonight's show is made urgent and thrilling by Ted Hughes' living translation, but it feels perhaps a little academic in style and tone. Having said that, we are in the middle of an ancient Oxford college, with an audience that probably contains several people who could quote large sections of the original Greek off by heart. If there's one place in the world where a slightly academic production should be praised and welcomed, it's here. And somewhere on the other side of the River Styx, Ted Hughes is watching, and patting his pet crow in satisfaction.