Agamemnon – The Fall of the House of Usher

Title: Agamemnon - The Fall of the House of Usher
Author: Berkoff, Steven
Price: $20.00

Adapted from Aeschylus' great tragedy, Berkoff's version of Agamemnon evolved over a long period of workshop sessions with the London Theatre Group and was first performed at the Round House in 1973. The definitive version was presented at the Greenwich Theatre in 1976. The play is about heat and battle, fatigue, the marathon and the obscenity of modern and future wars.

In The Fall of the House of Usher Berkoff takes Edgar Allan Poe's horrific tale and, as one French critic described it, explodes the text to create a new form that retains the central core. The play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974 and subsequently at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1975.

Stephen Berkoffs characteristically idiosyncratic version strips the story to the bone [and] reduces the crumbling, monstrous house of the title to Roderick and Madeleine Ushers incestuous bed, and a lavish dinner party to a hilarious episode with a tub of sorbet. ~ Jonathan Gibbs, Time Out

...just when his exaggerated and often comic expressionism seems to be going too far, Berkoff will return to the startling imagery of the original, seamlessly combining Poes often purple Gothic prose with his own spiky punk poetry ... The Fall of the House of Usher is an intriguing, if slightly removed, experience that continually excites the senses. ~ Oliver Jones, Whats On
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Agamemnon is about energy of a different kind, but overlaps with my play east. It is filtered through my own impression of Greece and is rooted more in the elements of landscape and sea.. It is also about heat and battle, fatigue, the marathon and the obscenity of modern and future wars. Naturally it is about the body and its pleasures and pains. I followed aeschylus but chose to take my own route from time to time. events smudge into each other and I have used from the Feast of atreus the ghastly origins of the curse. This is a suitable horrific beginning, though horror was not what I wanted but a revelation of the crime. I described it as if it had happened to me.the final text evolved after a long workshop series during which the actors turned themselves into athletes, soldiers, horses and chorus. the text was chanted, spoken, sung, and simply acted, l am really grateful to two actors (Wolf Kahler and Barry Philips) who started the first day (sometime in April 1973) and finished with me on the 21st august.

Notes:Original Playwright - Aeschylus

Publication date: 01/08/1990
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781872868011
Publishing status: Last copy archived