link below to a playlist of 'The Oresteia' in it's entirety:
http://www.youtube.com/view_pl ay_list?p=5494FD96045CE1F9
Aeschylus' "Eumenides" (also known as "The Furies") is performed here in the ancient style--all males under masks with singing voices, music and limited motion.
The National Theatre of Great Britain Oresteia Company in masks by Jenny West. Translated by Tony Harrison.
Chorus (in alphabetical order):
Sean Baker (also Priestess)
David Bamber
James Carter
Timothy Davies (also Pylates)
Peter Dawson
Philip Donaghy (also Clytemnestra)
Roger Gartland (also Electra)
James Hayes (also Nurse)
Greg Hicks (also Orestes)
Kenny Ireland (also Apollo)
Alfred Lynch (also Aegisthus)
John Normington (also Cassandra)
Tony Robinson (also Servant)
David Roper (also watchman)
Barrie Rutter (also Herald)
Michael Thomas (also Athena)
Director: Peter Hall
Aeschylus here tells the Athenian people, that when they have fairly recognised and fully accepted any physical law of society—that parricide, for instance (he was bound to take an extreme case, and pronounce his parable in about 1000 lines) is a thing inconvenient, and incompatible with the greatest amount of comfort and welfare— then, the best thing to do is to go and respectfully bury in the nearest gully the bugbears that were imagined in benighted ages as superhuman sanctioners of that law.
That is all he says, and it is quite enough for one tragedy. The situation of these last words of a great philosopher and poet is interesting. The Oresteia is the only Greek trilogy which malignant influences failed to extinguish. The Eumenides is the only last play of a trilogy that they have allowed us to have. It is the last tragedy composed by Aeschylus, a son of Eu- phorion, an Athenian.
The preference which one has for Aeschylus over the two poets who mark the other two categories of thought seems capable of being accounted for thus. Euripides represents the spirits of satire, such as Lucían, Rabelais, Voltaire, and the rest, who never tire of telling us ' you men are a little breed : and we, who can see how ridiculous and how base you are, are only the finest specimens of your kind'. Sophocles has with him all those poets and thinkers who get no farther than to a profound sorrow for the life and fate of the human race, after the fashion of Heracleitus whose eyes were never dry. Aeschylus always raises the cry of "Noël!" Good news! ' and holds up the oriflamme of endless improvement. This was proclaimed in allegory by Homer in his episode about Proteus and Eidothea, and echoed by Virgil in his tale of the almost accomplished bliss of Orpheus and Eurydice. Aeschylus is the poet of hope.
A great Latin writer says in some memorable sentences: "the result of my contemplation of nature is a conviction that she is always trying to produce something perfectly good, and that nothing is impossible to her; nor is there anything which human genius cannot find out about her'. He, the elder Pliny, himself one of the martyrs of science (Aug. 25, 79 A.d., aged 56), is rather too much inclined to despond; and who is not? But he looked forward with confidence to the sure victory which will be achieved over all those evils which are called by the names of vice, crime, and disease.
-- John F. Davies (1884)
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