Review: THE ORESTEIA, Bridge Theatre

There is a dig at Simon Stone in The National Theatre's new Misanthrope, a jab at ultra-contemporary classical reboots staged in rotating glass boxes, the Australian auteur's calling card. His adaptions of Phaedra and Yerma turn his actors into caged zoo animals prowling around their confines waiting for pent up emotions to burst. It’s rinse and repeat for Stone’s take on The Oresteia at The Bridge. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?

Greek Tragedy has long been treated as raw material for theatre makers to toy with. Stripped to its core and reinvented for 2026, Agamemnon, war-lord and sacker of Troy, becomes Christopher (a perm-scowling David Morrissey), a stern defence-tech executive selling kit to the highest bidder for a war in the Middle East. Iphigenia becomes Isabelle, an activist daughter who storms her father's factory in protest and trolls him online, threatening his financial empire rather than being sacrificed to save it as in the original.

Although suavely cloaked in contemporary dress, the underlying dynamics don't quite translate. Greek tragedy demands that the killing be both morally understandable and unconscionable at once. Isabelle takes her own life rather than being sacrificed by Christopher, and the cycle of revenge that follows never garners the weight it needs. By the end of a gruelling three and a half hours, there isn’t much moral meat left on the bone, just a slasher gorefest.

Stone’s calling card staging that looks and feels like a theatrical version of a Netflix limited series. The revolving house simulates languorous camera shots, fraying dialogue cuts between its own bickering. Lizzie Clachan's revolving set, a house of Modernist concrete, glass and icy light, does the atmospheric heavy lifting. The timeline gets jumbled to inject psychological thrill, aptly echoing a structure from Christopher Nolan films, whose The Odyssey opens in cinemas this same week. Performances lean into the subtlety. Mics pick up each fleck of spit, each heavy breath. Rosy Sheehy is a standout as Alice, whose insecurity, we can detect bubbling beneath the surface. Mary-Louise Parker’s Monty (standing in for Clytemnestra), is all clipped vowels and controlled stillness that culminates in a tangibly terrifying climax.

Even so, the emotional core heart is distant, beating on the other side of the glass box. We can see it, but can’t grasp it for ourselves.

But Stone's script works best when it lets the myth's machinery drop away and the performances blossom. Christopher's murder arrives after a dinner party: divorced parents trading blame for how they failed their children, moral collapse unfolding over obnoxious sourdough and champagne. By the end, the curse of the House of Atreus has folded into the real destruction still playing out across the globe. Complicity is not metaphorical. The gods didn't do this, we did, and we keep doing it.

The Oresteia plays at the Bridge Theatre until 19 September

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