The Oresteia of Aeschylus

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My daughters have had amazing experiences with Melissa and her wonderful team. Highly recommend! Am bummed my kids are aging out.” Chris Tandy as Odysseus in the Mark Bruce Company’s 2016 dance version. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian The Oresteia, a trilogy of plays ( Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides) written some 2500 years ago by Aeschylus, is a founding text of world dramatic literature, still widely read and performed. Set in the time of the Homeric epics, its three plays tell the story of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces at the Trojan War, moving from conflict and revenge through expiation to resolution and peace. It’s extraordinary to recall that these plays were performed in daylight hours to an audience of many thousands, a truly communal experience for the Athenian populace. Tom Phillips’ haunting, asymmetric masks on the cover and throughout the text, remind us that this was the manner in which these pays were originally performed, and recent directors and actors of Greek tragedies have had the opportunity to rediscover the freedom which the wearing of a mask can afford the performer. But in this particular case, the similarities between these three translations, especially in the paratextual material, suggest a partial correlation between the translators’ social positions and their readings of the Oresteia. All have inadequate introductions or afterwords, which make magniloquent statements about Aeschylean ‘greatness’ but treat the complex ethical and political questions entangled in his trilogy with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Bernstein, for instance, assures the reader that The Eumenides‘ends with the triumph of democracy’, without providing any discussion of the characters in the play – the women and the Furies – who are excluded from the new politics, on the stage as in real-life Athens. Higgins, Charlotte (2015-07-30). "Ancient Greek tragedy Oresteia receives surprise West End transfer". The Guardian . Retrieved 2018-08-13.

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The Flies – an adaptation of The Libation Bearers by Jean-Paul Sartre, which focuses on human freedom The tallies are indeed equal at the end, and Orestes is allowed to leave for Argos. The Erinnyes, unsurprisingly, are not happy with the decision and threaten to destroy Athens in Orestes’ stead. Fortunately, Athena mollifies them by offering them a new role – the one of the Eumenides, the kindly protectors of Athens’ prosperity. Proteus Ian has written numerous stage productions including OH WHAT A NIGHT!, Sl eeping Beauty The Musical and One Night at the V.E. Day Proms. The play explores the key existentialist themes of freedom and responsibility through the radical conversion of Philebus the peace loving intellectual into Orestes the warrior. A person may not be prepared for present crises by his past experiences, but it is nonetheless bad faith for him to declare, 'I was not meant for this' or 'This should not be happening to me.' Orestes resists bad faith and achieves authenticity by rising to the demands of his circumstances and fully realizing his being-in-situation." [8] Oresteia, trilogy of tragic dramas by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, first performed in 458 bce. It is his last work and the only complete trilogy of Greek dramas that has survived.Trousdell, Richard (2008). "Tragedy and Transformation: The Oresteia of Aeschylus". Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. 2 (3): 5–38. doi: 10.1525/jung.2008.2.3.5. JSTOR 10.1525/jung.2008.2.3.5. S2CID 170372385. The rhyme and half-rhyme, here and elsewhere, create a sense of an ornately poetic and claustrophobic dramatic world. His own linguistic style errs towards the unambiguous and the clear; finding an ironic eloquence in the plain-speaking that some of the characters themselves demand, Bernstein is nowhere more affecting than when declaring moral disquiet. Orestes’ moment of doubt after he has put his mother and Aegisthus to the sword in Choephori, is honestly and very movingly wrought:

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Henrichs, Albert (1994). "Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos". Illinois Classical Studies. University of Illinois Press. 19: 27–58. JSTOR 23065418. You are amazing! Thank you so much for doing this class. I really appreciate the enthusiasm, caring, and patience that you showed our kids. I really hope to keep my child engaged in theatre. I am so thankful her first taste was through your organization and with you in particular.”

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I could not have done my part without the help of many people. Bedell Stanford first, of course. He offered me what I have needed most, Ionic tolerance and Doric discipline. So much patience with my questions, so many cautions to revise - he has been the brake to my loco

Emily Wilson · Ah, how miserable! Three New Oresteias · LRB 8

In Jeffrey Scott Bernstein’s masterful new take on Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, he plays it relatively safe, which is not to undermine either the renewed emotive force of the Tragedy, or its essential gravitas. Bernstein’s prosodic skills carry an easy and appropriate sense of solemn momentum as though investment in encouraging foreboding were the drama’s central dynamic. And it works: Cassandra’s terrible prognostication in the Agamemnon bears down on the reader like a train from a tunnel, enabling an efflorescence of metaphor; the Furies ‘troubling the rooms with that primal wrong’ bring swift resolve in the embodiment of vengeful, alliterative hubris: Ruden echoes the riddling strangeness of Aeschylus’ language but makes the puzzle more or less possible to solve. The nature of Tragedy – its propensity for time transcendence – lends the form a unique serviceability, for who could deny the currency of love and loss, remorse and revenge in the landscape of any era? The overwhelmingly important things – the emotions by which we live and endure – are some of the characteristics which define the Tragic approach. They themselves endure as prismatically as their ablest interpreters; the long chronology of Tragedy has been dignified throughout by re-invention, translation and re-interpretation, to varying degrees of success, but with the certainty of motivational relevance even where the contexts of lived experience are changed out of recognition. What Athena, the goddess of wisdom, realizes in Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy, is something supposedly uttered by Mahatma Gandhi two and a half millennia later: “an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” Namely, even if justified, in the long run, the old law of retaliation is just too costly for the community, since any murder would naturally result in many more. Consequently, the never-ending cycle of revenge is appropriately replaced by civic justice, a newly instituted court of law whose word should be final on all matters, bringing them to an indisputable end – one that will have to be accepted not only by mortals but by gods as well. The Gender WarGreekMythology.com editors write, review and revise subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge Bury, J. B.; Meiggs, Russell (1956). A history of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.347–348, 352.