Vandal Sacks Atreus

By T.E.K.

AGAMEMNON by AESCHYLUS

Revisionist drama has become the bane of the theater. It is merciful that Shakespeare, Chekhov and Aeschylus are not alive to view the bizarre "improvements" inflicted upon their classic works by the whims of directors like Peter Brook and Andrei Serban.

To the Rumanian-born Serban, who has become the latest fad hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without any discern ible contact with her beloved home.

With Agamemnon, Serban again takes liberties that amount to license.

King Agamemnon (Jamil Zakkai) has returned from the Trojan War with a concubine, Cassandra (Priscilla Smith).

His wife Clytemnestra (also played by Smith) has taken a lover, Aegisthus (also played by Zakkai). Clytemnestra bears an implacable hatred toward Agamem non for the blood sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. The king had courted the gods' favoring winds for the voy age to Troy. Agamemnon and Cassandra enter the House of Atreus to be brutally butchered by Clytemnestra.

If the playgoer were unfamiliar with the story, Serban's version might convince him that he had happened upon some weird and obscure tribal ritual.

The dialogue descends to incantatory gibberish, bogus Greek and primal screams; There are enough flaming pots trundled about the stage and so many candlelit processions of the Hollywood-extras variety as to suggest a new source of lighting for the World Trade Center.

The dances are jaggedly choreographed, incidental music has the tex ture of a blind fog, and the costumes might have been purchased on the Skid Row of the Casbah. The acting is on the high school epic level -- strident, collision-prone and panicky. Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater ought to be declared a disaster area.

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