Sacred and mundane

There can be few riskier theatrical tasks than the modernising of classic Greek dramas.

And the latest production in Erica Whyman's intriguing Under the Curse season is an uncomfortable demonstration of the point.

What should be terrible and grand, with Electra and Orestes conspiring to murder their already murderous mother, Clytemnestra, turns out to be bathetic and pathetic in Jean Giraudoux's 1930s version of the classic Greek drama.

And Winifred Smith's translation does not help, though no one dares laugh.

"Girls, I think you'd better leave us," murmurs Ben Silverstone's impressively fraught and brooding Orestes to Three Furies. These strange women have red blobs on their faces, strike dramatic poses and speak like oldfashioned debutantes.

"Have I come to this, I who as a young woman loved tending my pets and sewing?" asks Joanna McCallum's Clytemnestra.

With her air of haughty grandeur, a bandanna and brown silk dress, Miss McCallum's retired femme fatale faces up to memories of her husband's murder in the tones of an affronted 1930s Lady Bracknell, offered fish-paste rather than cucumber sandwiches. The momentous is rigorously trivialised.

Jean Giraudoux's Electra, relocated to the 1920s or 1930s, proves far less exciting or relevant to the 20th century than similar retelling of comparable Greek narratives by Sartre or Jean Anouilh.

Structurally, Giraudoux's play departs radically from the Sophoclean or Euripidean original, deprives it of spiralling tension and misses, for instance, Electra's great recognition scene with her brother.

A dreary, loquacious discussion drama about public and private conscience, justice, mercy and the morality of killing develops. An adulterous couple, to compare with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and a Pirandellian Gardener are ploddingly interpolated.

Soutra Gilmour's playing area is, symbolically, a coffin-shaped rectangle, the audience ranged on its perimeter.

Miss Whyman's players put realism to flight. Embarrassingly they project and throw their voices in this intimate space as if performing for the aurally impaired.