Word: agamemnon
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...SCENE: a majestic, wide expanse of desert in the ime of Agamemnon. Nothing but lazy dunes and azure sky for miles. The camera slowly pans, and in the background we hear, 'chhht-zzzz.chhht-zzzzz." The familiar rumblings of a Polaroid SX-70. Hardly what one would expect...
...naked, sun-baked disc of a stage, designed by John Napier, is shaped like an inverted shield. The prophet Calchas has told King Agamemnon that the thousand ships becalmed in the harbor at Aulis will receive no favoring wind to retrieve Helen and ravage Troy unless he makes a blood sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. With passive fatalism, Agamemnon sends a duplicitous letter to his wife Clytemnestra asking her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis on the pretext that she is to be given in marriage to Achilles, supreme hero-in-arms...
...when a much perturbed Agamemnon (John Shrapnel) first appears onstage, he has changed his mind. He hands his messenger a second letter telling his wife not to leave the palace at Mycenae. Agamemnon's brother and Helen's husband, Menelaus (Tony Church), waylays the messenger and rails at Agamemnon for his vacillating disloyalty to Greece. Achilles (Mike Gwilym) warns that the troops are restive and mutinous after the long delay. Affected by his brother's torment, Menelaus suddenly shifts his adamant position and suggests giving up the entire expedition to Troy. But the fates have decreed otherwise...
...Greek tragedies move through pitch points of passion, moments when men look into the abyss of self-revelation. In Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which begins this cycle, there are three pitch points. The first comes as Agamemnon reasons with his daughter about the need for her death. Shrapnel sensitively conveys the deep inner anguish of a man torn between duty to his country and love for his child. As Clytemnestra, Suzman moves through a parabola of feelings, marking her again as one of the finest actresses on the English-speaking stage. And as Buxton reaches the heartbreaking conclusion that...
Preceded by fanfare, Agamemnon's chariot is drawn to a halt before the door of his palace. He is the happiest of men, or so he thinks. The chorus of crones, clad in ominous black, knows better: Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegis thus (Peter Woodward), who now rules the land as a tyrant. He is intimately linked to the origin of the curse on the House of Atreus. All too soon the cries of horror sound as if from some echo chamber in hell. The fates are inexorable: the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are eventually hurled onto...