BELT Up Theatre don’t do programmes, but if they did... they would probably be the best programmes in the world, judging by the York ensemble’s thrilling assault on Greek tragedy.

In the meantime, emerging from the cloak of mystique is a student theatre company from the University of York that is seriously hot property.

Award-winning success at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a Theatre Royal Studio production of A Clockwork Orange that was as much of a knockout as the one suffered by a bloodied leading actor, are now followed by James Wilkes and Dominic J Allen’s blood-pumping reincarnation of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, The Oresteia. David Stuttard and Tamsin Shasha’s Actors Of Dionysus once set the benchmark for Greek dramas in York, their works noted for their thrusting physicality and poetic, descriptive, alliterative language.

Belt Up are no less physical – you will be led to your seat by the hand, you may be proffered a laurel wreath “for safe keeping”, and please be prepared to have your hair ruffled by one of the wild Furies hovering among the seats – and they have a welcome willingness to show you action rather than the annoying ancient Greek playwright’s habit of telling you what has just happened.

Wilkes and Allen have ruthlessly down-sized Aeschylus’s verbose trilogy from four hours to a seamless, combative 90 minutes, as the feuding Greek family of Agamemnon (Marcus Emerton), Clytaemnestra (Rachel Finnigan) and malleable son Orestes (Tom Powis) go about their murderous business, hell bent on stockpiling revenge upon revenge.

The editorial cuts are so well administered that character motives are made all the clearer and heightened, in turn intensifying the raging drama. Without ever sending up the savage extremes of Greek tragedies, the writers find more comedy than you might expect in such bloody soil, especially in their echoes of gothic film-maker Tim Burton in the ghostly figures of the Fates (Emerton again, Tom Ellis and Niall Walsh).

Keeping an eye on their fob watches from behind the darkest of shades, they are the play’s time-and-motion men, hustling everyone to the finale at the maximum level of theatrical productivity.


The Oresteia, Belt Up Theatre, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.45pm, tomorrow at 3pm and 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568.