Oresteia

I read the trilogy out loud in Year 12, with my next sister, laying feet to feet on the sofa, both of us eventually falling asleep. Don't remember much from the plays themselves.

But my Year 10 sister is studying them this month--she's reading Classics, and I'm her Classics tutor. AKA she's rubbish at self-motivation, and I have the lovely task of keeping her on task.

And in this case, it truly is lovely, because I found this brilliant 1983 production by the National Theatre of Great Britain. You can watch all of Agamemnon online. And seeing how it is a play, YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE READING IN ANYWAY.

Their version is more modern than the Lattimore translation I read, modern without being contemporary, yet at the same time, it has an Anglo-Saxon torque. Paradox! I love it!

Traditional Greek masks and minimal movement beside prose that takes you back to Beowulf... its chanted, sing-song alliteration, and its stunning, word-canvas kennings... whale-road, ring-giver, bone-house.

There is stupendous rhyming-couplet banter between the chorus and the primary dramatists, eerily reminiscent of Inigo Montoya and Fezzik onboard their ship. (Are there rocks ahead? If there are, we'll all be dead.)

And since the females are played by men, in classic Greek style, every time Clytemnestra appears, she/he terrifies my sister by placing her/his hands on her/his hip and thigh... in a way that, to quote my sister, real women never do, except Robot's Fender.