O poveste superbă, cu multe teme fundamentale, executate magistrale.

Ma io povera stolta cosa posso mai scrivere di questa Opera? mi sono veramente sentita super ignorante, non ricordo piu' niente di ciò che ho studiato ....... ho fatto una fatica bestia, ma ho veramente goduto ogni passaggio della tragedia di Clitennestra e soprattutto della povera Ifigenia...
Agamennone, mi spiace, l'ho odiato da subito....( ragionando da madre del 21°sec.!!)
Per la seconda e la terza parte.....ho dovuto chiedere aiuto ovunque, persino alle figlie liceali, che fatica!! Le Coefore e Le Eumenidi le ho trovate complicate e piene di incastri e personaggi a cui il mio povero cervello non riusciva proprio a stare dietro....
Mia figlia, presa da pietà, mi ha allungato la dispensa facilitata per il Liceo...
Ho detto tutto!!
( ho proprio dimenticato tutto quello che ho studiato al Classico... che vergogna!!)

BBC Radio 3 adaptation by Simon Scardifield, Ed Hime & Rebecca Lenkiewicz

I've had a couple of false/slow starts with the written Oresteia this year, so to tick off a 'Classic Tragedy' category in a reading challenge, I listened to this production of the three plays, which is packaged with an old half-hour In Our Time episode about Aeschylus' trilogy. (I'd have preferred a production using Robert Fagles' translation, to read along, but couldn't track one down.) The blurb for the Audible edition says that Edith Hall introduces each play; as I listened to the four separate segments online I didn't hear that, but Hall is one of the speakers in the In Our Time discussion. The whole lot adds up to four and a half hours, and all speakers are engaging and dramatic, so it works well as an audiobook that can be taken in almost effortlessly whilst doing other things.

At time of writing I've not read further than the early part of Agamemnon (before the eponymous king speaks), so I can't compare most of these radio versions with a translation that strives to be more faithful to the original - but from that opening, and other info I already knew about the plays (including from part of of Fagles' introduction, and a lecture series by Peter Meineck), it's clear these are modern versions with noticeable differences. Each of the three plays is adapted by a different writer; I'm not sure whether it's because I'm more familiar with Agamemnon that I found the first one most engaging, or if it was simply that Scardifield's version of the first play was the best of these three.

Quotes here are from audio, and may not be exact as they came from notes typed in a hurry using abbreviations.

To make the watchman's opening narrative and exposition more natural, Scardifield has given him a new young assistant, a former shepherd lad. As this teenager has just started the job, the older watchman tells him about their task, the beacons they are to look out for, and a bit about the history of the war. The radio format allows for flashbacks to the beginning of the war, including soldiers waiting and grumbling as the ships are stuck in port, Calchas' proclamations, and Iphigenia being lured with a promise of marriage to Achilles. The two watchmen are fleshed out as characters; the older one is an ex-fisherman and also set up some of the beacons on other islands. The young lad is starstruck on meeting Clytemnestra and Aegisthes. It was a bit blurry to me which voices constituted the chorus, but the adaptation gives a strong sense of a working-class presence in the play when, after the watchmen have informed Clytemnestra of the beacon, they get talking to an older woman in the street, who was once a prostitute in the soldiers' camp before the army sailed.

The adaptation has these mechanicals performing a sacrifice of Clytemnestra's best heifer on her behalf, which I wasn't sure about, but at any rate their conversation was interesting. There's the typical mix of opinions you find among working-class characters in a contemporary adaptation, some more religious and respectful of leaders, others resentful and opinionated about, for example, men coming home as ashes in jars. (Again, Ancient Greek history isn't an area I specialised in, so whilst this felt like a deliberate analogy for modern experiences, I can't say for certain.) We get typical contemporary comments on Classical religion like "gods that go about sticking their deathless dicks in anything that takes their fancy".

I was surprised how much Cassandra protested, as of course she'd know it would make no difference, but Ancient Greek tragedy is a very different emotional mode for starters. I liked the choice of accents here. Calchas - the representative of the archaic religious world the trilogy marks a move away from - is the most noticeably old-school posh in these productions, the sort of voice you'd have once expected Classical tragedy to be spoken in almost entirely. Other characters are northern English, though the royals more lightly, leaning towards RP - and Cassandra is played by a Romanian actress using her accent to emphasise she is from a different society to the Argives.

It is all effortlessly immersive with a strong sense of drama and strong personalities, as it should be. Additions, such as Menelaus throwing his and Helen's bed into the sea and sobbing and brooding on the beach for two days, had the right high tragic feel, as did lines like "as fate thunders past I just want to feel its breeze, instead I feel like I'm strapped to its wheels". I was glad also that it made the play feel historically specific and situated, as I hadn't wanted to dwell on the weight of its universality at the moment. Yet this version was one of those that seemed to add to the original rather than reductively boxing it in, as some radically modern versions of ancient classics can. (The more I read about Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf the less keen I am on the idea of it.) I was taken aback when I listened to a short clip of Scardifield discussing his Agamemnon adaptation that he homed in on the same words "specific" and "universal" that I'd found myself thinking about when listening to the play. The writer achieved his aims then.

The Libation Bearers needs context for a lot of modern Western readers who aren't already well-versed in Greek history. It almost goes without saying these days that one would understand why Clytemnestra wanted to avenge Iphigenia, and to assume there would have been solidarity with the dead sister among her surviving siblings, even if they were also frightened of their mother. Yet this is not, of course, the attitude of Electra and Orestes. Their sense that it was much worse for their mother to kill their father than it was for their father to kill their sister is related to the Greek idea - contradictory to modern science, that the father was the true parent, as mentioned in The Furies. (And that in theory at least, men could even reproduce alone as with Zeus producing Athena.) It is thoroughly contextualised by Hall in In Our Time, though I didn't listen to this until afterwards: Electra only appears in the first half of play, performing libations, and then the mourning song with Orestes once they are reunited: unlike her mother, she only speaks the words that proper, well-behaved girls do - religious & mourning language and thereafter is sidelined for the conflict between male and powerful, transgressive female. But as Orestes is fundamentally a dutiful son, he, as Hall points out, he needs his mate to talk him into killing Clytemnestra. Ed Hime's adaptation seemed to do its job fine but it didn't wow me the way Scardifield's Agamemnon did - though this could have been because I had least pre-existing knowledge of this play out of the three here.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's version of The Furies uses a narrator, which on the one hand seemed like cheating slightly, but also makes the action easy to follow for those unfamiliar with the basic plot. (There was quite a bit about it in Meineck's lectures so I was already aware of it.) Last week I read this article and review by Emily Wilson, about the Oresteia and new translations (thanks to Alwynne for posting it). Wilson complains about the heavy preponderance of Oresteia translations by men and the lack of feminist commentary on the Furies / Eumenides in the editions under review, and so it was interesting to stumble into one of the few versions put into English by a woman playwright. Because of this I particularly noticed the grand dramatic vehemence of the Pythia in arguing with Apollo about him trampling over ancient divinities, in warning about how men think so much of themselves in life but are dust when they die, and how she talks sarcastically about the higher value put on the death of a father; she proclaims that Orestes should wander like a neglected outcast. And likewise Apollo's attempt to banish the Furies (who were also characterised at the beginning of the play by a stench) to places of torture and execution, and the phrasing that they are not not women, but creatures, and should live in caves with lions, aberrations. Athena, presented by Aeschylus as a just and neutral force (though one who gets short shrift from some modern commentators), says here that the system of trial she brings is "counsel untouched by thought of gain" and she decides she "shall not call the death of Clytemnestra worse", also addressing the Pythia respectfully by acknowledging "you are far older". The Pythia accedes, and there is another invocation of fertility as primarily male, as Athenians are promised near the end, "Your flocks will multiply. Pan will teach them to bear twins."

I don't tend to get on very well with Emily Wilson's commentary, in pieces like the LRB review linked above or in her Odyssey introduction, and Edith Hall on In Our Time made similar points in a way that I found more amenable and interesting. I had no idea from Wilson's article of the historical context of what she says there, whereas Hall explains that "since de Beauvoir, feminist scholars and also those of the psychoanalytic school like Melanie Klein" (and, another speaker added, even since Karl Marx), "the Oresteia has been taken as the charter myth of male domination, slamming the door on women in western culture, art and society until Nora walked out of the Doll's House". She later adds that it is also "the charter myth of the state and of trial by jury", that fear is now supposed to be of the state's justice system, not of the family - and another says that it transforms ancient myth into civic myth.

(And in symbolically authorising an impersonal, centralised system over kin networks, it paves the way for Westernisation itself, as per The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich - although that traces the practical origins of the process to first-millennium Christian prohibitions on cousin marriage, with, so far at least, insufficient discussion of the extent to which these were actually enforced.)

However, Hall didn't answer the question I found myself with after reading Wilson's piece: why could this even have been a turning point for women? I see no reason to have expected it to have been: in mythological terms it's going from a system in which a king could sacrifice his daughter without being stopped, to a system of court and law in which women also had very little say or power. The type of system changed but its gender politics didn't.

Perhaps there is a mythological memory/analogy of greater equality between the sexes before the rise of Bronze Age city states. Archaeological research on the strength evident from prehistoric women's bones"suggests that the sexual differentiation of labor became greater or more formalized after the Neolithic than during it." (Quote from here. Study here.) But that isn't the story of the actual Oresteia: Clytemnestra is already aberrant in its world; it is goddesses and other supernatural female beings who have power equivalent to their male counterparts, not typical mortal women. The civilised and gender-ambiguous Athena can be contrasted with the wild and chthonic Furies and Pythia - but she also contrasts, as a patron of Athens, with the wild and chthonic and male Poseidon. If it's anything it's another increment rather than a door slamming suddenly.

Even Fagles' introduction has an almost incantatory spiritual heft which seems bold and unusual for a Penguin Classic these days - a very welcome relic of the 1970s as far as I'm concerned (so I'm sorry to hear talk of his translation being superseded as the contemporary default by the Oliver Taplin edition). Whilst there were a few seismic moments in these adaptations, that mode wasn't sustained in the same way. Yet it also made them more approachable at a time when I wasn't up for several days' worth of reading in the heightened ancient tragic mode.

I'd certainly recommend these recordings if you enjoy modern prose adaptations like this - though as to how close the bulk of them are to the originals, you'll need to get a verdict from someone who knows those better.