Elizabethan Greeks

Beware of Tyrone Guthrie bearing Greek gifts. The pity and terror of tragedy are alien to his impish nature. He has an irresistible urge to inject modernity into a classic through props, stage tricks and character stunts rather than to extract what is timelessly significant in the play. He is more like an M.C. introducing novelty acts than a director exploring drama. All of these traits mar his direction of the Minnesota Theater Company's The House of Atreus. The production is ambitious in intent but puny in passion, execution and depth.

The House of Atreus is an adaptation by John Lewin of Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia. Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to win from the gods a favoring wind that will speed his fleet to Troy. Mad with grief and fury, his Queen, Clytemnestra, awaits the return of the victorious King from the Trojan War, and while he is in his bath she stabs him to death. Aided by his sister Electra, Agamemnon's son Orestes in turn murders both his mother and her lover Aegisthus. Pursued by the Furies, Orestes is tried before the goddess of Athens and acquitted at Apollo's intercession. But for the future, the goddess makes a compact "between the light of the mind and the voices of the blood."

In the Guthrie production, the cast wears somber masks as they did in the original Greek production, and for a while this adds a dimension of hieratic awe to the play, but soon the lack of human expressions reduces the effect to a kind of puppet show. The women's roles are played by men, also a custom with the ancients. At the outset, this is forceful and a trifle unsettling. Yet eventually the lack of sexual differentiation erases the central fact that this is a bitter domestic tragedy.

The language transpositions from the Greek lack eloquence, spareness or precision, and the contemporary colloquialisms iar the ear. Lines like "You mean you intend to kill your mother?" produce wildly inappropriate laughter from an audience saturated with Freud. The prevailing style of the evening is that of neo-Shakespearean swashbuckling, and the barely adequate cast seems to relish all opportunities for bombast and comic clowning. The chorus resembles the witches from Macbeth multiplied. The murders might as well have been performed by Richard III. Elizabethan Greeks are a novelty all right, but they reduce the play to historical pageantry, horseplay and melodrama when it ought to be blindingly focused on man's ineluctable rendezvous with fate.

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