Writer and Director: Simon Stone (After Aeschylus & Others)
Anybody who has been dipping in and out of social media over the past week or so cannot have failed to notice the chatter around the previews of this one. The overriding theme has been blunt enough: can you, or should you ever really have to, sit through the best part of five hours to watch a play? The earliest previews reportedly ran well beyond four and a half hours, with audience members slipping out before the end simply to catch the last train home. The running time has since been formally trimmed to three hours and 30 minutes, though press night still clocked in nearer three hours 50. Quite an ask, you would think. And yet what Simon Stone has created at the Bridge is, without a hint of hyperbole, an absolute marvel of theatre.
The Oresteia is, at heart, a family drama, but this being Greek tragedy, the family in question is cranked to the very highest setting: jealousy, betrayal, lust, infidelity, lies and, inevitably, murder. Stone both writes and directs, working from Aeschylus’s trilogy, possibly the oldest to survive intact, and he modernises it wholesale. The Trojan War becomes a more contemporary conflict, Chechnya and Afghanistan among them; the ancient house becomes a modernist mini-mansion in the countryside outside Tunbridge Wells; and the language, be warned, has been thoroughly updated too. If you flinch at the f-word or the c-word, know now that both are deployed with tremendous generosity.
The firm at the centre of it all is Middletech, run by the patriarch Christopher (David Morrissey) alongside his elder brother Melville, the more senior of the two and the one who bullies his way through the rest of the family. Christopher’s wife is played by Mary-Louise Parker, and together they have three children: twins Isabel and Alice, both played by Rosie Sheehy, and their son Augustus. The play opens on the twins’ 21st birthday, except that Isabel, the elder and by some distance the more wayward, and yet perhaps the most loved of the lot, is absent from her own party. She is out on an anti-war march, and the sting in the tail is that she is protesting her own father’s company, whose technology is widely believed to be fuelling wars around the world, and the devastation and loss of life that come with them. Into this household come cousin Jerome and his teenage son Lorenzo, 18 and conspicuously close to Alice. The scene is set, and being a tragedy, it does not go well.
We then leap forward ten years to find Augustus half-naked on the lounge floor, covered in blood, claiming to have murdered his mother and stepfather. From there, the evening travels back and forth across 10 to 15 years, unpicking how a family ever arrived at such a moment. It is a murder mystery, essentially, but ratcheted up to 11, told not in a straight line but in fragments, each family member getting their turn: the mother’s version, the father’s, the surviving daughter’s, the son’s, the cousin’s. What emerges is a drama of exceptional tension that grips from the outset and simply refuses to let go, no mean feat across a running time like this one.
The core cast is, without exception, phenomenal. Each inhabits their character with complete naturalism, carrying them through the full arc of the journey. It is fair to say that not one of these people is remotely likeable, and yet there is something in every one of them that the audience connects to regardless. Morrissey and Parker anchor it all with real weight. But the evening belongs, finally, to Tom Glynn-Carney as Augustus. His is the most emotionally damaged soul in a house already full of them, the one whose slow unravelling drags the whole piece towards its terrible conclusion, and the denouement rests almost entirely on his psychological collapse. It is a performance of raw, escalating desperation, and it is through his eyes and his splintering grasp of what has actually happened that we assemble the truth.
Stone’s writing holds the modernity of the setting and the ancient bones of the original in the same hand, and the join between them is all but invisible. His direction is frenetic, and the production around it matches him beat for beat. Lizzy Clachan’s set is, on the surface, simplicity itself: a house. But it is a house imagined for the stage with real brilliance. Bedroom, bathroom, walk-in wardrobe, kitchen, pantry, an upstairs bedroom and hallway, the whole structure sits there in front of you and revolves through a full 360 degrees, carrying you to whichever corner the action happens to demand. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame each room and let you peer in, making the audience quietly complicit in what unfolds, innocent bystanders at a private catastrophe. Nick Schleiper’s lighting lifts the whole thing into something that hides and reveals in equal measure: darkness in one corner, and then a light finding traces of blood, an upturned table, a body, a dirty sofa, a spotless lounge that has no business being so clean. Together, it builds a heightened, near-unbearable sense of tension.
If there is a niggle, and with a show of this calibre, it really is only a niggle, it is a technical one. The sound, picked up through the actors’ mics, drifts off now and then, the sort of glitch that will no doubt settle as the run beds in. The frenetic script also asks several heightened conversations to happen all at once, which occasionally makes it hard to follow any single thread in full. And yet even that ends up working in the show’s favour, lending the whole thing a hyper-realistic quality, the overlapping clamour of a real family all talking over one another.
What is truly wonderful is that, in an age of TikTok, endless scroll and content sliced ever thinner, here is a show utterly unafraid to take its time. Four hours, give or take, sounds unbearable on paper. In the room, when the craft is this complete and the drama this compelling, time simply stops mattering. Stone, his cast and his crew have made something that makes you forget the clock entirely and pulls you headlong into a terrifyingly intense family tragedy, one that leaves most of the house aghast and gasping in something very close to delight.
Simon Stone has taken the oldest surviving trilogy in Western drama and turned it into the most electrifying night currently on a London stage. Ferocious, frenetic and profoundly unsettling, anchored by an ensemble without a single weak link and staged inside a revolving house, you cannot bring yourself to look away from. Yes, it is long. No, you will not care. Ignore the running-time hand-wringing and go.
Runs until 19 September 2026
