Based on the story of Achilles's idle soldiers and their leader's sulking refusal to join the Trojan fray, this play is billed as "a brand new ancient Greek tragedy". That's a bold claim to make; particularly when ancient Greek playwrights are currently in such short supply, writes Peter Crawley
The accomplished adapter, Mike Poulton, working from eight remaining fragments of Aeschylus's The Tragic Iliad while filling the considerable gaps with Homer's The Iliad and his own creativity, has finally brought the Myrmidons to the stage with Ouroboros theatre company.
And what a stage. Marcus Costello's impressive design contains references both ancient and tantalisingly contemporary, from subtle evocation of an amphitheatre to the suggestive placing of disused spears and an anachronistic oil can. In Poulton's play, the shadows of war are traced with melodic and sometimes aggressively rhythmic language. If the writer suggests we've been here before, without labouring the point director Simon Coury's production suggests we're there again now.
Although scrupulously bound to Aeschylus's intentions, Poulton's play is thankfully no faux-period reconstruction. Rather it has a foot in the past and the present, combining the eras through the music of elevated speech and the grace notes of modern phrases. As Denis Conway's sonorous Apollo describes the despoiling, raping, murdering conduct of war, he adds, sardonically, "Well, boys will be boys." With less concession to the present day, Poulton has made the Chorus his central character, an unfashionable move with satisfying results. Speaking in harmony, or in rumbling counterpoint, and presented as coiled and sinewy beings, they represent an agony of stasis; frustrated killers spoiling for the fight.
It is harder, though, to engage with the individual roles, who, with the exception of Conway's wily Odysseus, seem less assured. Poulton and Coury amplify the sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus to such a degree that Will Irvine and James Russell come off almost solely as lovers and never fighters, with the supposedly wrathful Achilles several shades more effeminate than strictly necessary.
At a little over 90 minutes, Myrmidons doesn't avoid occasional longueurs (of course, neither did the Myrmidons) which may be the inevitable consequence of a play about inaction. In its sound and spectacle, however, and in the echoes of an age that slyly reverberate with our own, Myrmidons has the power to stir and absorb. Poulton has reintroduced Aeschylus to the audience, and something tells us we haven't heard the last of him yet.
Runs until September 9th
