A review by sebseb
Orestes and Other Plays by Euripides

5.0

Philip Vellacott's introduction whisks you back to the politicised passion of 1972, and reads as quaintly (sometimes eye-rollingly) opinionated by today's standards. I frequently found myself unpersuaded by his elitist and totalizing framework (the people who GET Euripedes versus the unschooled masses and critics whom he disagreed with) and also his assertions that the characters know much more of the plot than they seem to and so have various ulterior motives that invariably make them more cynical than they appear on the page/stage. That said Vellacott offers plural readings of characters and situations, so even if he insists only one of these is "correct" he does his readers the service of providing historical knowledge and interpretations that allow us to form our own disagreements with him. "Here are the tools you'll need to challenge me" - the mark of a great teacher.

As a series of plays tracing the evolution of Euripedes's anti-war thought, together the works reveal an interesting progression which makes them valuable as a set, although I didn't read them quite in order. Really wonderful. The notes are sometimes useful but only numbering one line a page made it really hard to track down lines referred to, which interrupted the reading experience considerably.

Vellacott: "A play can be both a tract and a tragedy, and everyone who goes to a theatre has the right to say what he finds there." <3