Persians

by Kaite O'Reilly

On title page: "Aeschylus Persians in a new version by Kaite O'Reilly"

114 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Kaite is an award-winning playwright, dramaturg and prose writer. She was awarded the 2010/11 Ted Hughes Award for New Works in Poetry for her new version of Aeschylus's 'Persians', directed site-specifically on Ministry of Defence land in Wales by Mike Pearson in National Theatre Wales's inaugural year. Two recent productions were part of the Cultural Olympiad, celebrating the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics, produced at Sheffield Theatres, Wales Millennium Centre and Southbank Centre, London. She blogs on creativity and process at www.kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com She is completing her first novel.

Reviews

[Ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updating this Aeschylus play requires three things:

1) One needs to make the audience / reader feel the pain of the Persians
2) And to feel a little of the original Greek audience's sense of "this is what we had to do to survive -- it was a necessary heroic thing and not easy"
3) And to have a stream of beautiful lines and words stream over us like music.

This remarkable version surely accomplishes the first and third of these, and makes a great attempt at the second which, if I ever get to see the play performed, I think will also succeed.