With two consecutive sold-outs, the audience (12-13/7) welcomed Aeschylus’ Oresteia at the theater of Epidaurus, staged by the internationally acclaimed Theodoros Terzopoulos, who returned to ancient drama after a ten-year absence, inaugurating his first collaboration with the National Theatre.
A tribute to the ancient theater and to the director. A show that is expected to be the cultural event of 2024.
In “The Oresteia” – the only surviving trilogy – a monumental work, so that it is considered by some scholars to be the “quintessence of the human spirit”, Aeschylus offers a new “myth”, an alternative for the creation of the world on new bases, moving away from the pure theological view of the world, which dominated most of his tragedies.
Based on the myth of the sinful family of the Atreides, he conducts his negotiation in such a way that his social and political perceptions are revealed through fundamental conflicts: the male and female elements (Agamemnon – Clytemnestra), the maternal and the filial (Clytemnestra – Orestes), of the old and the new (the chthonic and dark Erinyes with the bright Athena).
In “Agamemnon”, which opens the trilogy, the feeling is created that the dominance of matriarchy is complete. An androgynous heroine, Clytemnestra, despotic and philarchic, with a strong lust for power, rebels against male rule. Defending the rights of the mother, who was deprived of her daughter, but also the rights of the woman, who was abandoned and now forced to share the vital space of her legal wife, with the guarded concubine of her victorious husband, Cassandra, she commits the act of spousal murder.
But according to retributive archaic morality, blood thirsts for blood, a blow calls for a blow, after all, Clytemnestra’s act is a disruption of the established social order. That is why Orestes of the “Hoiphoros”, pushed by the human factor (Electra), but mainly the divine (Apollo) will respond to the patricide with matricide, unraveling the cursed thread of the Atreides family to its end and completing its cycle blood. The act of “Judge” Orestes is not only an act of revenge, symbolic of the son’s weaning from his mother, but above all symbolic of the overthrow of the matriarchy, which Clytemnestra wanted to impose.
In the “Eumenides”, which close the trilogy, the dramatic sequence of events, which until now was based on the linear scheme: cause-effect (murder-punishment), is interrupted. Orestes, though guilty of matricide and trapped in the menacing noose of his mother’s Erinyes, emerges from the isolation of individual life to finally be rendered innocent in the community and the political arena as his father’s rightful successor. Freed at last from the archaic and anachronistic justice of the Erinyes, his acquittal bears the stamp of the new political justice of the courts of the Athenian state.
It is clear that the peaceful and consensual epilogue of “The Oresteia” suggests that in the consciousness of the tragic poet a new political order is in the process of its creation, which requires an alternative cosmology, a new myth of the beginnings of the world. This new view of the world is reflected in the course of the events of the trilogy: from conflict, blood and self-righteousness to composition, reconciliation and consensus. From disharmony and disorder to harmony and order.
As emerges from the public speech of Theodoros Terzopoulos, during the preparation of the performance, the Aeschylean trilogy was treated in terms that correspond to its monumental character, with the director characterizing it as “the birthplace of Western civilization”, basing its aesthetics on dynamic relationship of the body with Myth, Time and Memory and the essence of the performance in the flatulence between logic and instinct.
On an interpretive level, the central roles were supported by actors trained in the internationally recognized method of approaching the ancient drama by the director: Savvas Stroumbos (Agamemnon), Sofia Hill (Clytemnestra), David Maltese (Aegisthus), Tasos Dimas (Guardian / Usher), Aglaia Pappas ( Athena), with Cassandra as Evelyn Aswad, Elektra as Niovi Charalambous and Orestes as Konstantinos Kontogeorgopoulos.
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