Óresteia At The National Theatre Is Gruesome And Glorious

Theatremaker Benedict Andrews expounds on his latest undertaking with Þjóðleikhúsið

“If you went, ‘We’re doing four hours and 15 minutes of this very, very violent ancient Greek text, with the lights on all the time and everybody sitting there,’ that will be considered a box-office risk,” Benedict Andrews remarks as we meet in his sunlit, Esja-facing studio in Reykjavík’s creative hub, hafnar.haus. “The idea that it’s become genuinely popular, as well as a critical success here… it’s really, really inspiring, and makes me want to just keep digging in new ways here.”

Benedict’s staging of Aeschylus’s 458 BC Greek tragedy Óresteia premiered at Kassinn of Þjóðleikhúsið between Christmas and New Year’s, garnering significant attention. Intensely physical and immersive, the performance is a trilogy of plays that broadly explores justice and vengeance, especially within family structures.

The Australian-born, Iceland-based director has been theatremaking here for over a decade, staging Shakespeare works such as King Lear and newer works like Marius von Mayenburg’s Ex. Before and while Benedict has directed in Iceland, he’s had an illustrious theatre and film career abroad, working with renowned actors such as Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson. He often challenges traditional expectations for an evening of theatre to create something more extreme: he staged Shakespeare’s eight War of the Roses plays as a two-evening, eight-hour affair; he often changes the genders of characters from the original script; and he elects to write his own adaptations of works.

But despite this, Óresteia is his first Greek tragedy (well, outside of opera). “During Covid, I had this moment — like so many people — where we thought, ‘Will the world ever open up again?’” he says. “I thought, ‘If theatre does start again, it’s very important to go back to the bedrock, and to go back to the Greeks.’”

He continues, “As theatremakers and audiences, we want to keep staging them and keep seeing them because [there’s] something in their marrow, or — to mix metaphors — a plutonium inside them. You want to keep digging into that, because the charge is still there. We stop doing plays when the charge goes. There’s a billion plays that aren’t done anymore. But why does this play from 458 BC want to keep coming back again and again and again?”

Photo by Owen Fiene

In the round

The staging of the play doesn’t use a traditional proscenium arch, nor does the audience all face the same way. Here, Óresteia is seated in the round, with a big overhead lightbox (which consulting dramaturg Melkorka Tekla Ólafsdóttir describes as a “blazing Greek sun”) as the nucleus of the room.

Light is central to this play, where some of the most notable moments come from when the audience is plunged into complete darkness. But, for the majority of the show, the lightbox remains on, illuminating the faces of everyone in the room. It can be uncomfortably intimate when you make eye contact with another theatregoer, but it’s also intensely humanising to see, clearly, who is in the audience around you.

“I knew I wanted to have this more democratic seating, with the audience in the round and the pressure of that…four equal banks of people watching, and we watch each other watching,” Benedict says.

Building blocks

Throughout our conversation, Benedict moves around his studio, pulling out books from his shelves to point out specific inspiring passages, referencing set design ideas from a notebook of pasted-in images; in one moment, he picks up a stone from his desk to show me what he was thinking of for the stage. “I said, ‘If we could get a slab of marble from a quarry in Italy, that would be great. But it’s probably going to be a little too expensive to bring over,’” he laughs.
“There’s a billion plays that aren’t done anymore. But why does this play from 458 BC want to keep coming back again and again and again?”

The stage itself is constructed from hundreds of stacked, blindingly-white lemke stones. Through the performance, the stones are moved, broken, and thrown; they are about 10 kilograms each but break apart like chalk, coughing dust into the air each time one is smashed. The stones themselves construct what Benedict calls a “sandbox for the actors to play in,” beginning as a neatly constructed stage and evolving into a grave, an altar, a court, all before our eyes.

Instead of set changes in the breaks between plays, the actors’ altering of the stage during the performance gives way to an interesting effect. “I’m really anti-fake in theatre,” Benedict explains. “I think by exposing the mechanisms of theatre, you approach theatre’s truth. I like to expose the construction of the reality and involve the audience in that.”

This construction of reality continues in the show’s props; when a character is killed, another actor on stage takes a big sip from a jug of stage blood and spews it in their face. Despite us knowing this is prop blood, we see it exit the bottle it is sold in, it nevertheless feels as gruesome and affecting as real blood. In another moment, a character puts what looks to be a Powerade bottle with the label removed between her legs and squeezes it, to pee over her husband’s corpse. We know this is water, we see the bottle, but it is still just as affronting as the act itself.

Breaking the fantasy

“I think the production very much plays with this overlap of the ancient and the postmodern, and of contemporary warfare with ancient warfare,” Benedict points out. “I knew that for the idea of the Trojan War to exist in the present, and not just as some kind of sword and sandals fantasy…[he would have to] break those images that we have.”

One instance where Benedict breaks this “sword and sandals fantasy” and the contemporary bleeds in is the third act: it is composed as a therapy session, where Órestes is the patient, and Aþena is the therapist. Other modernisations are embedded in the text itself, through quick references to “fake news,” or longer passages where Benedict interpolates quotes from outside sources.
“What are the ruptures that we’re built on as people? What are the cracks inside us, and what are the cracks inside of our systems?”

In a particularly gripping moment in the show, Clytemnestra breaks from her rhythm and holds a hand aloft to recite: “This is something that not even the worst horror movie director on Earth could imagine. The consciousness of the world is dead.” Benedict explains, “That’s a direct quote from those first months of the genocide in Gaza. And I wanted people who knew that quote, for that to jolt them out.”

He continues, noting that Greek tragedies have “become even more urgent at the moment because these great plays come from times of crisis, when societies are changing…[the Greeks] were coming out of long wars, they were trying to develop new ideas for what it meant to be as a society. And from this idea of change and rupture, come these great dramatic forms that have so much compacted within them. These plays are about what happens when the violence of war is dragged into the home, and where the home itself becomes a kind of civil war. I think that’s a very daily occurrence for us at the moment, when we wake up every morning and see distant, unbearable atrocities and conflicts on our phones.”

Then, as we talk about the themes of the play, he clarifies, “There is an idea that was once held about these plays that said, ‘Oh, they’re exploring the moment of the birth of democracy and the birth of the judicial system, and Aeschylus is arguing for the importance of that. I think that’s a misunderstanding, and that it’s the argument of a coloniser. That’s used by people to say, ‘These are great classical texts, and they can teach us what’s good.’ Instead of saying, ‘No, even at the time, these texts are saying: What are the ruptures that we’re built on as people? What are the cracks inside us, and what are the cracks inside of our systems?’”

Modern technology

“Theatre’s this very special, volatile space that gets us where we can think virtually and collectively and play out things that we can’t do elsewhere,” Benedict says. “The audience are all under this same collective life. I think it exposes what’s special and precious about theatre, [and it’s] maybe something we need when we carry every image ever made around in our phones. And now, images made by non-humans,” he sighs, and the two of us share a sad laugh.
“It speaks to people’s hunger to get away from their screens and to be together and experience something.”

He admitted in a Q&A session with Melkorka and journalist Egill Helgason that the original draft was over five hours, which Melkorka revised down to its current runtime. The script itself was an undertaking — Benedict wrote it in his native English, then worked with poet-translator Kristín Eiríksdóttir to render it into Icelandic. This is not Benedict’s first time undertaking a play that’s not in his mother tongue, which he notes can be a bit “destabilising.” However, he explains, the experience becomes “like Gloucester says in King Lear, after he’s been blinded — someone asks him how does he see, and he says, ‘I see feelingly’…It gives us another analogy for, if you lose one sense, you have to open up another one.”

Every aspect of this play itself is a massive undertaking: the script and translation, the five actors taking on ten roles alongside forming the chorus, a stage that must be partially rebuilt each night, the actors leaving the stage slathered in half-dried clay and blood and flour, a jarring score performed by Bára Gísladóttir (who began Óresteia’s run performing live for the duration of the show in the corner), the director adeptly constructing a nuanced and extreme performance. Further, it can feel like an undertaking asking an audience to focus their attention on a four-hour play (when the theatre is, thankfully, one of the last places where it is still shameful to take out and check your phone).

When I ask Benedict what compelled him to make a work of theatre this long, he explains it simply: “I wanted people to sit with it. I think it’s a wonderful miracle that people do, and an act of grace. And it speaks to people’s hunger to get away from their screens and to be together and experience something.”

Óresteia is an ongoing show at The National Theatre’s Kassinn, and tickets are available through March 28.