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The Review - THEATRE by JESS CHANDLER
Published: 19 February 2009

Tragedy of Greek proportions

THE WATER'S EDGE
Arcola Theatre

GREEK tragedy has frequently provided the model for American playwrights to explore contemporary domestic life, and Theresa Rebeck’s play continues this tradition.
Based on the first part of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, The Water’s Edge parallels the story of Agamemnon’s return, aspiring to a scale of tragic pathos far beyond its reach.
The house by the lakeside that forms the play’s setting has been deteriorating since the day Richard was “exiled” by his wife, 14 years ago.
Helen is Rebeck’s Clytemnestra, existing tenuously on the borders of hysteria, and blaming her estranged husband for the death of their daughter, who drowned in the mysteriously alluring lake.
The play opens as Richard returns, his pretty young girlfriend in tow; he hopes to reclaim the past, to repossess his home and children, and lose himself in the solace and detachment of nature.
The reunion of this traumatised family is characterised by guilt and blame, love and hatred, madness and obsession.
The play moves from a tone of awkward, guarded suspicion, to one of hoped-for reconciliation, which is soon crushed in a painfully dramatic overflow of hysterical passion and revenge.
Oedipal subtexts battle with musings on justice in an attempt to fit the story into its tragic mould.
The play is let down by its ambition; its story and its characters carry the foundations of a powerful contemporary psychodrama about family, and the modern obsession with ownership and possession.
But in striving for tragic proportions, Rebeck has distorted an excellent premise into something awkward and self-conscious – a play that is trying to be something it is not.
Until February 28
020 7503 1646

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