This production, a unique collaborative project led by the Oxford Ancient Languages Society, will stage a complete dramatic recreation of Euripides’ play, demonstrating the vivid dramatic fruits of meticulous, interdisciplinary scholarship.
It will be performed entirely in the original Ancient Greek (with English surtitles), with authentic costumes and masks. Crucially, it will restore Euripides’ drama to its full musical glory. All the sections of the play that were originally sung have been set to music, newly composed in the ancient Greek modes, using all available evidence about Euripidean music, and incorporating an ancient fragment of music from the play that may be by Euripides’ own hand.
The chorus and our talented solo singers will be accompanied on the aulos (ancient double-pipes) by the renowned aulete Callum Armstrong, resulting in a transformative audience experience, closer than ever to the Athenian stage.
(From the Oxford Ancient Languages Society’s site: Euripides’ Orestes)

If you are interested in seeing and hearing what a production of Euripides’ Orestes might have looked and sounded like in ancient Greece, be sure to check out the Oxford Ancient Languages Society’s YouTube page for their 2024 production of the play as well as the shorter videos explaining how they approached such a recreation and some choices to be made when performing it. There are also some insightful pointers on seeing how Euripides called out and incorporated limitations of dramatic techniques of the time into the play.

• Oxford Ancient Languages Society’s YouTube page
• The play (1 hour 55 minutes)
• Sources and choices in the recreation of the play (24 minutes)
• A shorter introduction on performing Orestes (8 minutes)
• Three articles by the director Nicholas Romanos at Antigone journal
  • Recreating Euripides’ Orestes
  • Making sense of Euripides’ Orestes
  • Setting Euripides to music

At the live production the English translation of the play was projected onto a screen behind the stage. The screen is rarely seen in the video, but the closed caption option will provide an English translation. The addition of music and song add much to the production, providing an otherworldly touch at times. The masks, too, with their unsettling and unchanging visage produced a creepy feeling for me as well.

The essay “Making sense of Euripides’ Orestes” linked above is extremely useful in understanding the play and several ways to view the message behind it. Romanos provides a nice “further Reading” section, listing Karl Reinhardt’s essay “The intellectual crisis in Euripides” that he explores in some detail within the article.

Euripides, Reinhardt argues, intentionally takes the old social morality of Tyndareus, the political realism of Menelaus, and the ‘heroic’ desire for action and glory evinced by Orestes and his friends, and demonstrates how they degenerate into sheer absurdity. The heroes become criminals, but “never for one moment in the whole crime do they lose the consciousness of their heroic morality”.
(from “Making sense of Euripides’ Orestes“)

I have to admit that recently reading Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon may have colored my viewing of a Euripidean play, possibly helping me enjoy this production even more than I would have otherwise. Although the actor portraying the Phrygian caused many smiles without any outside reference.

I’m not going to go into any depth on the play itself other than to mention two differences between this and Aeschylus’ Oresteia that always stand out for me in reading and were clear in this performance. The first is the difference in resolutions: establishing justice (Aeschylus) versus establishing peace (Euripides). The events of the intervening fifty years, especially with the seemingly endless Peloponnesian War, clearly had an impact on the later playwright. The second is the difference in Apollo’s role, from useless buffoon (Aeschylus’ Eumenides) versus decisive arbiter (Euripides). But then, how else was Euripides going to end the mess he had written himself into?

Highly recommended, especially to those that participated in Amateur Reader’s Greek play readalong of a few years ago.