A chain reaction

Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound describes an outbreak of war between savage gods. Yet how disturbingly human and pertinent to our own cruel times this classic Greek meditation on suffering and endurance seems in the riveting atmospherics of James Kerr's production.

Sound Theatre's studio playing space, a tiny triangle that hopelessly cramps the action and actors, would work more effectively as a proscenium, arena or traverse stage.

Yet the opening scene, with its rumbling thunder and murky lights, its painfully authentic crescendo of screams and hurling of chains by David Oyelowo's superbly harrowed and harrowing Prometheus achieves an emotional power and pathos that would adorn any grand stage. This actor is remarkable for his lack of histrionics, for his sense of suppressed anguish.

Manacled by hands and feet to rocks, blood and sweat dripping down his torso, as he tests the narrow limits of his confinement, Oyelowo sounds notes of authentic fear and desperation. Reduced by Zeus from divine status to infinite suffering, this Prometheus has the damaged air of a contemporary tortured prisoner, put away without trial.

The play itself, never professionally produced in London this last half-century and presented in Kerr's slightly archaic translation, lacks the stimulus of conflict. Instead it focuses on confessional narrative, of Prometheus's explanation to the over-large chorus of sympathising women of how he fell disastrously foul of Zeus. Optimistically, the god provides Hayley Atwell's hysterical Io with flashes of future hope.

Crucially, in Prometheus's lyrical account of how he rescued primitive mankind from abject ignorance, Aeschylus fashions a beautiful, alternative myth about humanity's evolution. And as Oyelowo's powerful performance ironically emphasises divine Prometheus, for all his prophetic knowledge of a secret that may save humanity, he cannot rescue himself.

Prometheus Bound