Off Plan

PETER CRAWLEYreviews Off Planin the Project Arts Centre, Dublin

“I am the paragon of restraint,” says Emma McIvor’s Clytemnestra, wearing a dress so blood-stained you could wring a transfusion from its hem and holding a dagger only slightly smaller than an oar. Who are we to argue? It does make you wonder, though, what approach director Rachel West and writer Simon Doyle have taken in Raw theatre company’s adaptation of the Greek revenge cycle for a contemporary audience. Do they really want to strip it down to bare essentials or blow it up for striking effect?

The answer, unsatisfyingly, seems to be both. Although there are stimulating ideas here in transplanting the benighted house of Atreus to a featureless concrete home on an Irish ghost estate, the production often struggles to reduce the epic stretch of Aeschylus’s trilogy to the scope of a family drama. Arch as Doyle’s version is (here the sacking of Troy becomes a housing development named Trojan Falls), his starkly demotic speeches and rhythmic mantras are often met with performers who simply stand and deliver.

The effect is to make a bloody drama seem oddly bloodless.

Without the chorus – a necessary sacrifice who have a vestigial presence in Alan Howley’s weary soldier – Anthony Brophy’s swaggering Agamemnon and McIvor’s tightly unhinged Clytemnestra often address us directly via microphones, spilling private quarrels into public proclamations, while Gary Murphy’s enjoyably smarmy Aegisthus issues Trojan Falls updates with a video camera, like a press conference.

The division between public and private comportment is underscored by a physical separation: designer Alyson Cummins has constructed a hermetically sealed “house” from which action is relayed on trembling video projections.

Sadly, its main achievement is to imprison and partly suffocate McIvor, while Mary Murray’s tomboy Electra and Paul Mallon’s banished Orestes are made more vivid, their performances loose and limber, conspiring in the garden while waxing nostalgic on ice pops.

There are plenty of allusions to property, war and corruption, but it’s childhood that becomes the most pronounced theme of this adaptation, expressed in a litany of innocent metonyms: chicken pox, ice pops, the long-dead family dog.

The mythic is folded again and again into the quotidian: “I’m sick of tidying up,” says Electra after the last bloodbath, as though it’s another household chore. Yet the suggestion that a family’s virtue can be restored, or a nation’s for that matter, seems heartfelt. The Oresteia moves through torrents of rage and revenge to self-governance and civility. Raw’s production holds us fitfully along a chain of strikingly disturbing sequences and alienating stretches, but it does point to the characters onstage – slaves to property, shorn of identity – and asks, with understandable rhetoric, who lives in a house like this?

Until Feb 27