Aussie prodigy Simon Stone seems to be the de factor resident director at the Bridge these days: last year he directed Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and next year he’ll direct Chekhov’s Ivanov. This year, he tackles The Oresteia, which is credited as ‘Aeschelus and others’. That’s a nod to the fact that Stone’s adaptations are extremely free and easy and you can expect only the loosest relationship to any one specific version of the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who takes violent revenge on his mum Clytamnestra for his father’s murder. Excactly how Stone’s Oresteia will play out is TBC, but the sole line of description suggests a typicaly free adaptation: ‘A contemporary family wakes up in a Greek myth and can’t seem to find a way out of their hellish destiny.’
Usually Stone’s plays come with a big name celebrity attached, and it has to be said the Oresteia is liable to be a tough sell without one, but you can probably attribute the current lack of a name to the fact the show was a last minute replacement for Ivanov, which got shunted to 2026.
