Tim Piggott-Smith The Independent's interview with actor Tim Piggott-Smith, who is Agamemnon in the Donmar Warehouse's coming production of Hecuba, incidentally gives a round-up of some of the plays and films to look out for. Here's some of the interview (look out for an interesting sentence or two on the tragic chorus - useful for essays?):

Tim Pigott-Smith is enjoying a boom-time for the Greeks...
  • Iphigenia at Aulis was well received at the National;
  • the RSC is putting on another production of Hecuba (not the most popular work by Euripides) next year, starring Vanessa Redgrave;
  • and five movies and a mini-series about Alexander the Great wait in the wings.
  • Pigott-Smith will appear in Oliver Stone's Alexander, to be released in November.

Now he is preparing for his role as the commander of the victorious Greeks at the end of the Trojan war.

Agamemnon ... is still steeped in blood as well as sex, his mistress the Trojan seer Cassandra. It's a touching measure of Pigott-Smith's uxoriousness (he has been married for three decades to the actress Pam Miles) that he makes an excuse for him: "Well, it's been a long time. I don't think the poor bloke had any idea when he left that he'd be away for 10 years."

At the start of the play, he says, Agamemnon is

"completely knackered, mentally and physically. He's desperate to leave Troy, to go home, and then Achilles' ghost pops up and says, 'Hang on, you haven't properly honoured me.'"

Before he will allow the winds to lift the sails of the Greeks, the ghost demands a final sacrifice - of the daughter of Hecuba, the captive Trojan queen (played by Clare Higgins).

For Agamemnon, the situation has a dreadful echo, whose last reverberations he has not yet heard: the war began with the slaughter of his daughter Iphigenia to speed the fleet on its way, a killing that has lit the long fuse of his wife's murderous revenge. While, in the first half of the play, Agamemnon allows himself to be the instrument of fate, in the second he must judge Hecuba, who has taken justice into her own, iron-clawed hands.

"I think there's a feeling that Agamemnon has no resources left to cope with these new problems," Pigott-Smith says.

Jonathan Kent's production uses a new translation by Frank McGuinness, one that is clipped and stark, especially compared with previous ones. (A sample: whereas Philip Vellacott's version of 1963 has the chorus declare,

As a man falls sideways into deep water
And finds no foothold,
So you will fall from the desire of your heart,
And forfeit your life

McGuinness's says,

"You will fall into the harbour,
The cruel sea water,
You will gain your fill of pain,
And you will lose your heart.)

"Frank's language is very concentrated, very intense," Pigott-Smith says. "It focuses on the psychological aspect. We're going to start by doing it slowly, then faster and faster, until it's moving like a juggernaut."

This production also reduces the chorus to one speaker and one singer.

"Part of the reason is practical - you couldn't fit 10 or 12 Trojan women into the space at the Donmar. But, more than that, the chorus becomes a character, integrated into the play. I'm very pleased with that, because the business of 10 people speaking with one voice always feels unnatural to me. It's just not... British. Maybe, in those great Greek theatres, it was different - the chorus represented the society."

Our own society may be too fragmented for such a device, but the situation of the play certainly has a contemporary application.

"Yes," Pigott-Smith says, with a meaningful lift of his right eyebrow. "When you've won the war, you're faced with the problem of winning the peace." The play ends on a note of doom for Hecuba as well as Agamemnon - she will be punished for her violence by being turned into a dog, or, as Pigott-Smith puts it, with a grin, "caninisation".

In the Stone movie, Pigott-Smith plays Aristander,

"a visually challenged seer. I spend a lot of time with my hands in entrails."

The film required about as much planning as the original Alexander's campaigns, and a bigger budget. When Pigott-Smith showed up on his first day of shooting, in Morocco, he was confronted by 5,000 Macedonians in battle dress.

'Hecuba', Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 060 6624) till 1 November