The Oresteia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 19

The Oresteia

N 458 B.C. at Athens: the playwright Aeschylus won first prize with his three plays of the Oresteia, which immediately became recognised as his masterpiece, Recently the BBC commissioned a new translation from Philip Vellacott, and Raymond Raikes produced the trilogy for the BBC World Theatre. The first play in the series, the Agamemnon, will be heard next wéek from 3YC and 4YC on Monday, September 23, and from 1YC and 2YC on Sunday, September 29. The other two plays will be presented in the following weeks, These three plays were written for an audience who knew the outline of the plot and who also knew something of the past history of the Royal House of Atreus: that Atreus and Thyestes, sons of Pelops, became. enemies; that Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, and that Atreus in revenge killed the young sons of Thyestes and served them to him at a grisly banquet. For this crime Thyestes cursed the house of Atreus, and this curse descended to the next generation, to Agamemnon and Menelaus, When Helen, Menelaus’s wife, deserted him and-went to Troy with Paris, Agamemnon joined his brother at the head of a great expedition to sack Troy and recapture Helen. At Aulis the fleet was delayed by contrary winds which a seer, Calchas, prophesied would change only when Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis. By a trick, Agamemnon persuaded his wife Clytemnestra to send her daughter to Aulis, where she was sacrificed, and the fleet sailed. Clytemnestra was left alone to plan revenge, The trilogy opens with Troy defeated and the Greeks returning. Clytemnestra has taken as her lover Aegisthus, the sole surviving son of Thyestes, and together they murder Agamemnon. Part two tells of another vengeance. Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns to Argos and, at Apollo’s bidding, murders his mother and Aegisthus. Srhe lay takes its title, The Choephori Liberation Bearers), from the women who accompany Orestes’s sister Electra to Agamemnon’s

tomb, where they meet the returning exile, who is to kill his mother and be driven mad by the Furies.

"I believe," said Raymond Raikes, "that the first audience would not have known what to expect of Part Three, any more than we do today. It is called The Eumenides-a name for the Furies -but it cannot say much more of the madness of Orestes which has formed such a dramatic climax to the second part. Again, that first audience would have begun to wonder, with Aeschylus, where this insensate spate of murders would end, the chain of crimes cease, and the justice of gods and men be satisfied. Aeschylus has asked question after question in the first two plays, but he has found only a harsh, relentless Divine law. The listener should hear the trilogy to the end, if only to dis cover whether this poet, playwright ana philosopher can ever find answers to the problems he has raised. The fact that Aeschylus succeeded in doing this . + to our satisfaction today, helps to explain why this trilogy was acclaimed by Swinburne as ‘the greatest spiritual work of man.’"