Oresteia

 1989

Not strictly the 'Oresteia' as such: our sources were not only the Aeschylus trilogy, but the plays also of Sophocles and Euripides that treat aspects of the same story.



Screenplay for a film version, working title Fire from the Womb (a phrase spoken by the Furies in Aeschylus). In collaboration with the director Rudolf van den Berg, I worked from the Greek texts, which both of us knew, but our aim was to achieve a cinematic narrative and landscape free of all resonances of the 'Classical' or academic. After many shooting-drafts, and reversals, we were at last well into pre-production when finance suddenly failed. (See Cinema/unproduced.)