Oresteia Shocks Crowded Epidaurus (Video)

Those of us who were lucky enough to attend Epidaurus, one of the two sold-out showings of the trilogy, felt a little longer. “Orestea” (“Agamemnon”, “Huyphoroi”, “Eumenides”), Aeschylus, taken out Theodoros Terzopoulos In his first collaboration with National Theater.

It was a multidisciplinary show, of rare intellectual and aesthetic depth, shockingly timely, and indeed one of the shows that “illuminated” and expanded the boundaries of Epidaurus and beyond. Using as a vehicle the Oresteia, the only surviving trilogy of ancient drama and the last surviving work of Aeschylus, composed only two years before his death, reflecting the many rapid changes of his time, Terzopoulos confronts the “heavy artillery” of ancient drama and presents us with an Oresteia that will be hard to forget.

Everything showed a deep study. A study of the myth and the tragedy of Aeschylus in their relation to the historical and social context, history and its laws of movement, society and its contradictions. This was also the reason why the connection with modern history and today was not superficial, forced and external, but arose naturally and naturally, making the viewer an active participant, thinking, reflecting, seeing with a new eye what comes to him as it has been proven.

Terzopoulos, through Aeschylus, destabilizes the established power by revealing its rottenness. He unequivocally condemns imperialist war with clear references to the massacre of the Palestinian people, confirming the Brechtian verse that “even among the victors, the poor died in the same way”. But the strongest part of the show, in terms of content, is its third part, where the class character of both democracy that sends the poor unsuspectingly “underground”, and of justice whose decisions are exposed and which are dictated by the necessity of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, which exonerates the mother’s killer Orestes. This “new world” is the exploitative world that has reached our days and generated wars, injustices and refugees.

One Voice, Actors and Viewers, for Freedom in Palestine