Heart of the horror

Perhaps the barbarism and spectacular bloodshed of the fighting in Iraq has inspired the recent outburst of classic Greek drama revivals.

For as Katie Mitchell's horrifying production of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis reminds us, when it comes to describing the savagery and infectious depravity of war the ancient Greek dramatists were matchless.

The particular fascination of Iphigenia has to do with its treatment of human sacrifice as a stratagem of a war in which a cowardly commander seeks to save his own skin by shedding that of his daughter's, Iphigenia.

Miss Mitchell yanks the play from its fifth century BC moorings and anchors it in the 1930s or 1940s. She manages to make the behaviour of Ben Daniels's surprisingly insipid Greek army chief, Agamemnon, even more shocking.

It as if such primitive, sacrificial wickedness were a contemporary phenomenon. Euripides's non-specific location becomes in Hildegard Bechtler's striking design, an army headquarters requisitioned from a stately home, with high, grey-washed walls, lofty windows and stacks of upright chairs.

The chorus, true to the period mood though sounding affected in Don Taylor's bathetic translation, become a flock of blackgarbed, genteel ladies who hover in awkward nervousness around Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra, then scatter like frightened birds. Half true to their classic origins, they sing and dance to what composer, Paul Clark, makes sound mid-20th century jazz. The atmosphere grows bracingly strange.

The scene of Iphigenia's arrival with her mother, enormous piles of suitcases and flowers accompanying their appearance, tips the action mistakenly towards social comedy. Soon, though, the action takes a turn towards the heart of darkness where people change their minds and morals as if they were discarded clothes. Justin

Salinger's Achilles, behaving more like a campfollower than soldier and smugly resting on his own laurels, offers no help. Hattie Morahan's frail, fine, wide-eyed Iphigenia, shuddering with fear, realises she will be sacrificed to secure a fair wind for the fleet.

A wailing baby sounds sentimentality's note but Mitchell raises the temperature to fever-point. Kate Duchene's riveting Clytemnestra battles with Agamemnon, all sails flying.

Her shrill, trembling voice teeters on hysteria's verge, cracks and shrieks while her stoic daughter is rushed away like ritual lamb to the slaughter. A great wind blasts the beleaguered building where women hold out against male power. Astonishing.

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Iphigenia At Aulis