Images by Brett Boardman

The Oresteia. Memory theatre in 7 parts based on Aeschylus’ Drama.

Music: Liza Lim. Libretto Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky drawn from Aeschylus, Sappho & Tony Harrison.

Sydney Chamber Opera and Elision, conductor Jack Symonds

Carriageworks, July 24.

Peter McCallum 

Four and a half stars

Director Imara Savage’s new production of Liza Lim’s 1993 opera, The Oresteia, for Sydney Chamber Opera with the Elision ensemble binds the striking painful shrieks of Lim’s convulsive score and Kosky and Lim’s fragmentary, non-linear libretto to a coherent stage narrative of arresting images and cabalistic ritual. Aeschylus’s great trilogy from the fifth century BC, picks up the story of the recriminatory cross-generational violence that curses the House of Atreus at the point where Agamemnon, accompanied by his concubine, the prophetess Cassandra, returns victorious from the Trojan War, though he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to get there. Their murder by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, to avenge Iphigenia’s death, and Clytemnestra’s assent to the throne with Aegisthus (Agamemnon’s cousin and murderer of Agamemnon’s father Atrius) is the subject of the first play. The second deals with Orestes’ plan, with his sister Electra, to avenge the death of their father, Agamemnon, and his murder of his mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In the third play Orestes escapes his tormentors, the furies, and flees to Athens where Athena subjects the grievances to trial before twelve citizens on the Areopagus, and persuades the furies to accept the verdict, thus ending the curse with an affirmative message about democracy. Lim and Kosky’s work dwells more on the deep irrational forces that drive violence, revenge, justice and the violation of familial ties. It ends not with an affirmation of civic order but with an intimation the cycle will continue. In their work, Aeschylus’s story combines with its pre-history - the ghastly tales of Tantalus trying to serve his son Pelop’s body to the Gods, and Pelop’s son Atrius serving his nephews’ bodies to their father, his brother Thyestes, to be eaten. In Lim’s opera, all of these stories exist in memory (hence the term ‘memory theatre’) in a traumatic continuous present, locked in an inescapable vortex of blood relationships. The seven stage performers (six singers and one actor) enact responses with wild contortions of incantatory hysteria on stage, while the instrumental ensemble placed in front fills the air with multiphonic shrieks, scrapes and angular rhythmic shapes that seem to ricochet into a cavernous void.

The audience enters to see a stage on a stage, faced by rows of seats on a crimson floor populated by gesticulating bodies clad in black, their backs to us. The stage itself is occupied by a funereally clad singer, Jessica Aszodi (representing, as we subsequently intimate, Cassandra), nervously twitching, and a statue of an impressively horned deer, while a young woman in pristine bridal white (actor Indigo Lawson embodying Iphigenia) sits on the stage auditorium floor.  The tones of designer Charles Davis’s set are whites and pastel pinks, somehow evoking both a wedding reception and a funeral parlour. Aszodi’s monologue in the first part begins with Cassandra’s word of grief in Aeschylus’s play, otototoi, and, amid wrenching piercing sounds from the instruments she maintains searing intensity against manically energized enactments of despair from the others. There is no let-up in the second part as blood is poured over Lawson’s wedding white while Mitchell Riley (a representation, it transpires, of Orestes) sings in haunting multiphonics while fleeing across the stage in hyperactive bounds, and Simon Lobelson and Daniel Szesiong Todd (notionally Agamemnon and perhaps Aegisthus) enact performative anger and aggression.

In the third part the frenetic activity subsides though the agonised tone remains, and the singers sing of the cannibalistic parts of the story through retching vocal convulsion. Whispers and murmurs begin the fourth part as the score gears up again to screeching madness and the singers remove the chairs and crimson carpet tiles to reveal black earth. In the fifth section Jessica O’Donoghue embodying Clytemnestra’s ghost kneels on the earth in supplication and enacts the birth of Iphegenia against a cello solo. A grave is created in the earth in which Lawson, as Iphigenia, lies. The sixth section introduces brief fragments of regular rhythm between percussionist and singers as the singers cover Iphigenia’s grave with flowers. It briefly points to resolution and absolution. In the final section, Jane Sheldon, as Athena, sings a peaceful transcendent tonal melody against solo trumpet in textures of calm iridescence but her final word, ‘rage’, sung with an intake of breath, hints at a resurgence of the opening madness.

Navigating the music’s avant garde techniques and immense challenges with supreme clarity, conductor and Sydney Chamber Opera Director Jack Symonds directed the six singers and instrumental ensemble, Elision, in a performance of commanding control and astounding contemporary virtuosity. Although amplification of voices and instruments was part of the gestural extremity of the work, there were places where this could have been moderated to allow the listener to inhabit the sound more sensually, an opportunity that can be found in other works by Lim. Kosky’s 1993 production involved dancer Shelley Lasica and brought the instrumental players into the stage action. In part five of that production, both singers and cellist subjected the cello to bowing, plucking and hitting so that the body of the instrument itself became an object of the forces which propelled the drama, while the resultant sounds became part of the musical fabric. Savage kept the instrumentalists out of the action yet the stage-within-a-stage setting performed a comparable function, placing Cassandra’s unheeded prophesies above the drama in a way somewhat similar to a Greek chorus. The effect was compelling and channelled the work’s irrational forces and unremitting intensity into a message of forceful relevance to our own time.

The Oresteia runs at Carriageworks from 24 – 31 July, 2026