Sex, drink and death: Almeida announces trio of ancient Greek tragedies
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Version 0 of 1. Following three tempestuous performances in Juliette Binoche’s Antigone, Kristin Scott Thomas’s Electra, and Helen McCrory’s Medea, London is set to continue its current flush of ancient Greek tragedy as the Almeida announces its 2015 season. Ben Whishaw will star in an adaptation of The Bacchae, returned to its original spelling of Bakkhai by poet Anne Carson – her version follows her new translation of the aforementioned Antigone, currently playing at the Barbican ahead of a worldwide tour. Whishaw will play Dionysus, the wild and sensual god who comes into friction with the sober king Pentheus, played by Bertie Carvel, known for his role as the Trunchbull in Matilda. The production begins in July. In September, Rupert Goold will direct another new production of Medea, following the National Theatre’s take last year from Ben Power and Goldfrapp. Rachel Cusk, whose innovative novel Outline was much-acclaimed last year, is writing a new version of the Euripides tragedy, which is set to star Kate Fleetwood. The latter’s last collaboration with Goold, a production of Macbeth, resulted in her being nominated for a Tony award. Before each of those will be a May production of the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, adapted into a leaner modern reading, starring Lia Williams at the heart of an apocalyptically bloody family feud. The new version is created and directed by Robert Icke, who recently staged the intimate Wallace Shawn play The Fever in a Mayfair hotel room. Announcing the season, Goold said the team intend to show the plays in their “full complexity, presenting their formal iconoclasm, their humour, musicality, politics, violence and unswerving drama. These writers took society’s old myths and made them new: changed them, exploded them, set them loose as contemporary stories that spoke to their city. At the same time they posed big, provocative, uncomfortable questions; ones which two thousand years later, we still struggle to answer.” Goold added that “inspired in form and spirit by the Greek Dionysia,” the theatre would also put on discussion events around the plays. Tickets for the whole season go on sale to the general public on Tuesday 24 March. |