Word: gwilym
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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; Iphigenia (Judy Buxton) and Clytemnestra (Janet Suzman) have arrived...
Achilles is played with sullen vanity by Gwilym, and as his mother Thetis, Annie Lambert manages to suggest both a divine sea nymph and a contemporary cocktail-party hostess who, when asked about her mating with a mortal, Peleus, remembers the moment as "brief, hot and sandy...
Electra's brother Orestes (Gwilym) comes home as a stranger. After the famed "recognition" scene, Electra embraces him with incestuous ardor. Modern audiences can easily comprehend Freud's comment that he had merely systematized what the Greek poets had known all along: the slaying of the parent remains a ritual whose power to chill has lost nothing in 2,500 years...