From The Stage.

The Ancient Greeks really knew how to make a drama out of a crisis. There wasn't much time for navel gazing when the gods were around, meting out bloody justice, zooming in on human fallibilities. With the Ancients, far more comes out in the wash than you would ever have imagined. But a whole evening of it is like being trapped in the spin cycle. Timberlake Wertenbaker adapted Sophocles' three Oedipal plays as one production for the RSC in 1991 and now Radio 3 has staged it as The Thebans Evening., John Lynch starred in the four-hour marathon as a rather sexy sounding Oedipus but then I'm not his mother, so I'm allowed to say that. His mother, Jocasta, was played by Fiona Shaw with self-composure and great allure and Kenneth Cranham as Teiresias and Michael Feast as Kreon resonated complex emotions. There is a natural chronology and evolution in the three fifth-century plays, Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Kolonus and Antigone - but I have to admit I bailed out long before the end.

0: Despite the seductiveness of the performances, in a production by Nadia Molinari that was exemplary in its clarity, the intensity was draining. Ancient Greek drama is constructed rather like an over-sensationalised soap - one hideous disaster after another with no time for the trivia which just as indelibly marks our lives.