Aeschylus's Oresteia, the only Greek tragic trilogy to survive whole, reached the Bridge Theatre in a new version by Simon Stone starring Mary-Louise Parker and David Morrissey.
Simon Stone’s new Oresteia opened at the Bridge Theatre on Friday 3 July 2026 and ran to Saturday 19 September, with Mary-Louise Parker and David Morrissey leading a contemporary family trapped inside Aeschylus’s myth.
Aeschylus took first prize at the Dionysia in 458 BC with three plays performed in a single day: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. Agamemnon comes home from Troy and is killed by his wife Clytemnestra; their son Orestes kills her in turn, and is hunted by the Furies until a court is convened to try him. It is the only complete tragic trilogy to survive from the ancient theatre, and the satyr play that closed it, Proteus, is lost but for a single line.
What the trilogy stages is the end of vendetta: the last play replaces a family’s right of revenge with a jury, and the curse on the House of Atreus is settled by a vote rather than another killing. Directors reach for it when the question on stage is legal rather than mythological. The Furies are not destroyed at the close but given a place in the city and a new name.
Tom Glynn-Carney, Rosie Sheehy and Archie Madekwe completed the cast, on Lizzie Clachan’s set under Nick Schlieper’s lighting; London Theatre Company and Wouter van Ransbeek produced, and the evening ran three and a half hours with two intervals.