Ritual review – pizza, punch-ups and paint drying in an eight-hour epic with Orestes
Get lucky with your arrival time in this expansion of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and you’ll witness a fight or a sacrifice – but there are long dull patches
Egg yolk is being mixed up to make gold paint when I arrive at Ritual, an eight-hour-long performance installation in a windowless basement posing as a Mycenaean palace. I’ve just missed Orestes (a committed Charlie MacRae-Tod, in a hoodie and three-stripe trackies) fighting off a janitor with a knife, an audience member whispers to me, before being sternly shushed. Chastened, we return to watching paint dry.
In this ambitious but under-resourced production from immersive company Witness, first performed in New York, this former prince is in exile, waiting for communication from the gods before taking revenge for the murder of his father. For as long or as little as we like, we are invited to wait with him.
Written by Michael Bontatibus and directed by Charlotte Murray, Ritual demands patience but doesn’t always reward it. Get lucky with your arrival time and you’ll witness a fight with one of the Furies or catch Orestes making a minor meaty sacrifice. But turn up in a dud patch and you’ll spend a good chunk of time watching him chomp down dinner, hang curtains, or stare morosely at old maps and song sheets on a wall.
We’re free to explore in this expansion of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, to touch anything except electricals and other people. But the two rooms of the industrial space are limited, with much of the DIY set dressing conjuring the recent raiding of a charity shop: a Creme Egg mug; old paint pots; raggedy copies of Ibsen’s plays. The rooms don’t feel so much transformed as temporarily used for a store-room. The first space houses a worn mattress, a desk for scrawling letters, and several shelves piled with boxes of books and cloth and little model soldiers. The second feels akin to a prayer room, with portraits illuminated by plastic candles.
We shuffle around Orestes as he flits between the rooms, trying to keep out of his way while not blocking the view from everyone else – a tricky feat when everyone’s attention is focused on the same man. A lot of the performance is internal as Orestes thinks, waits and writes, his thoughts often hidden from us fleeting ghosts. For longer-term guests, there are few spaces to sit beyond the floor, which I seem to always choose just as our boy is off on another elusive errand.
The narrative is thinly spread, pieced together from peeking over Orestes’s shoulder to read the letters he’s writing, and the occasional monologue he records on tapes. He uses this method to track his days, though we gradually find out he’s been stuck here far longer than he thought. The rules of the world itself are frustratingly undefined. He has a shrine to his father’s ancient war helmet, but orders pizza from Deliveroo. We are trapped firmly in the basement with him, but witness a scene at a dinner table with Menelaus, where Helen repeatedly calls her husband “babes”.
Making Orestes’s hidden days experiential is an admirable idea – especially as it’s free to attend – but the scaffolding of this production struggles to hold up the claustrophobic intensity it desires. The creative team have no doubt slotted significant knowledge and textual authenticity into the story, but they’ve forgotten to help us find the clues. “The gods can be opaque,” Orestes writes to his uncle. As can this production, no matter how many hours you spend with it.