The Oresteia review – Simon Stone’s patchwork tragedy is a gripping and exasperating epic

Mary-Louise Parker gives a powerhouse performance in a three-part drama that cuts up Aeschylus’s chronology and adds shades of other plays

Although writer-director Simon Stone has named his play The Oresteia, the credits make clear that this is a drama “after Aeschylus and Others”. The Aeschylus is recognisable here, particularly in the most faithful, and supremely gripping, first of three parts. But the “others” are key too, with many shades of Greek tragedies thrown in, from Antigone to Medea, and maybe even Oedipus Rex.

Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, followed by his murder at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and subsequently hers by their avenging son, Orestes, is transposed into modern, metropolitan family life. There is Christopher (David Morrissey), who runs a tech company, his wife Montie (Mary-Louise Parker), an American alpha-type, and their children: Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney), offstage tearaway Isabel and her twin, Alice (Rosie Sheehy). They are so privileged that they speak of Bollinger as a cooking wine, and live in a house that has the corporate look of an upmarket hotel chain.

Elements of Antigone come through the figure of Isabel, based on Iphigenia, who is less sacrificial innocent and more political upstart who kicks against the patriarch at home whose company has been implicated in selling military equipment to countries including Russia, and whose bombs have recently killed a group of children (a nod to All My Sons?). But the most flamboyant departure is the cutting up of Aeschylus’s chronology. His cycle of violence takes us through the bloodbath killings and ends with the Eumenides, a spelling out of the moral and legal order. Here the killings are reported before they are dramatised, with a detective following the avenging figure of Augie.

The story shuttles back and forth in time, from pre-Brexit Britain to pandemic days and the present. The reverse storytelling still, astonishingly, manages to sustain tension and grip. But there is not a sense of inexorability, and of characters trapped in the machinery of unavoidable tragedy. It is perhaps because we do not know them very deeply. Like a TV thriller, the action holds you, but the frenetic plotting does not leave much room for the psychological element.

There is a lack of internal logic to the plotting and flat, shrill characters. Montie is certainly enraged by her husband’s sacrifice and Parker gives a powerhouse performance, but you are not sure of her intentions. Is she killing on principle, on whim or out of anger? She seems to be doing all three at different moments. She and her lover, Jerome (John Macmillan), kill Christopher while drunk but this undercuts Montie’s clear-eyed anger. It is as if Stone does not trust the stone-cold emotions of an ancient Greek drama to fire his narrative world. Christopher is a strangely sympathetic character, resigned to his guilt, beyond atonement, and Morrissey plays him with convincingly lugubriousness.

There are no gods here to intervene (although there is Christopher’s persuasive brother, Melville, played by Lloyd Hutchinson) and Christopher is given more of a get-out in this version. He has not outrightly killed his daughter, so all that comes as a result of this initial death does not hang quite as coherently in terms of motivation and moral consequence.

Other characters are entertaining but thin: the Sloaney Alice who is indulgently self-flagellating, albeit amusingly so in Sheehy’s hands, while Augie’s transformation into a war veteran and dead-eyed killer is too generic to feel true or tragic.

There are great, confident cross-references for Greek theatre buffs, but it does feel like story upon story and builds to a strange kind of thoughtlessness, charging relentlessly on. The family’s cycle of violence is expanded into Britain’s own: an Anglo-Saxon turns up to represent historic “invasion after invasion”. Contemporary wars are mentioned – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Chechnya – although there is a puzzling omission of current conflict in the Middle East.

On Lizzie Clachan’s dazzling set, we see the family inside their revolving home, rooms exposed, fugitive acts laid bare. It is a highly effective use of Stone’s hallmark glass-box. His social satire is on point too, but seems almost on the verge of sending this ridiculously entitled family up, and there is a jittering humour alongside the tragedy. By the third act, it begins to resemble a police procedural. There is the sense that these characters are trapped in their perpetually revolving lives, but also the feeling, by the end, that we are stuck here with them.

It is draining, invigorating, frustrating, original and ersatz, with too much thrown at it: Aeschylus, and then some.

• At Bridge theatre, London, until 19 September