Writer and Director: Serdar Biliş
Country must come above all else, the terrible choice that Agamemnon makes as he subdues his paternal feelings and agrees to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in return for a fair wind and the start of a war on honour. Serdar Biliş’s new 80-minute retelling at the Arcola Theatre puts Agamemnon in the spotlight, asking what it means to be a father and, through dialogue with his family, ‘real’ tales of childhood from the actors and interviews with the public, makes clear that he made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons.
Biliş, adaptor and director, blends together several different forms of theatremaking in order to recount this famous Greek tragedy, one of the key and decisive moments of the Trojan war, taking the audience in and out of the story, examining it from multiple angles to bring Agamemnon’s agonising choice closer to the contemporary audience. Part of that technique is to see the problem from everyone’s point of view, giving the King, his wife Clytemnestra and their eldest daughter Iphigenia a platform to tell their side of the story and ultimately to plead their case to the viewer in a translation by Stephen Sharkey. In this, it is Agamemnon’s view that is most effectively conveyed and more confidently performed, although the rest of the show works hard to undercut this interpretation with less success.
To contextualise this, Biliş interviews women from around the world, some who have or are experiencing war in Gaza or Ukraine, to reflect on what being a father should mean in those circumstances, stories from their own childhoods, including witnessing and enduring domestic violence and asking whether they could imagine sacrificing their child if required. These are insightful to a point, particularly in laying out a more relatable understanding of the human dilemma and costs which give immediacy and resonance to Agamemnon’s choice, but hardly anyone in Greek tragedy would win any kind of parenting or indeed spousal awards, so their inclusion adds little new insight or moral judgement.
Biliş could instead think more roundedly about how the domestic abuse questions are actually reflected (if at all) in what Agamemnon chose to do. The story presented in this version of Iphigenia is of a close and protective bond between father and daughter throughout their life together, with this prophecy the only hint of violence he has ever committed against her or his wife. The connection between these testimonies and the action of the play needs to be far stronger if any wider conclusion is drawn about Agamemnon’s patriarchal tyranny and lust for war.
Biliş draws Agamemnon more clearly than Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, giving him far more stage time and a reasonable no-win scenario that captures the complexity of political authority in a world of Gods, princely allies, an army and navy to motivate and a meaningful duty to his country, all of which comes across in Simon Kuntz’s reasonable and nicely conflicted performance. The writing is less strong in dialogue and in Indra Ové’s singular shrill hysteria as the angered Queen proclaims her indifference to the masses, while Mithra Malek’s Iphigenia is a thin cypher for what could be a more complex exploration of human sacrifice and stoic duty, torn between the different kinds of love offered by her royal parents.
Yet there is a sense of the grave implications of both sacrificing and not sacrificing a young woman to appease the Gods and the palpable complexity of Agamemnon’s choice between love and duty. In the end, as he stonily observes, “fate is all.”
Runs until 2 May 2026
