Theater: Olympus on the Thames

THE GREEKS Adapted by John Barton and Kenneth Cavander Directed by John Barton

We always return to Greece because it fulfills some need of our own life . . . Other nations made gods, kings, spirits: the Greeks alone made men.

—Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture

London's Royal Shakespeare Company has returned to the Greeks in a three-night marathon cycle often plays derived from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (seven of the ten) and a dramatization by John Barton of a segment of Homer. The cycle is presented as a trilogy: "The War," "The Murders" and "The Gods." Its purpose: to show the turbulent destiny of the doomed House of Atreus in chronological order. Barton, master builder of this endeavor, likes to work on the grand scale. In previous years he was celebrated for The Wars of the Roses, a panorama adapted from Shakespeare's dramas. Here he presents the antecedents, history and consequences of the Trojan War. His actors perform in and out of the chorus and move easily from one major role to another in the epic series. Barton, 51, has made the classic treasures of Western drama accessible to modern playgoers by using straightforward, idiomatic English and concentrating on the endlessly probing light of the Greek mind as the essence of our civilized heritage.

We are in a misty dawn of antiquity when we first see the chorus of high-spirited young women on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Aldwych Theater. They are prompting one another on the ancient myths, the way children count on their fingers. It sets the conversational tone of this dramatic cycle and evokes a time when people felt themselves to be not only the prey and pawns of the gods but their intimates as well.

The 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.

But 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; Iphigenia (Judy Buxton) and Clytemnestra (Janet Suzman) have arrived.