THE ORESTEIA

Play by: Aeschylus

Based on translation by: Ted Hughes

Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old trilogy of plays chronicles a society’s struggle to break the cycle of sacrifice, revenge, bloodshed, and punishment that plagues them. Ted Hughes’s powerful translation imbues The Oresteia with a burning contemporary relevance as it examines this struggle through the most personal microscope—the family cell—and stretches its primal and painful conflicts to their extremity. What is Justice? And what is our individual and collective responsibility to carry it out?