Review: "Girl on an Altar" at Irish Classical Theatre Company
- Anthony Chase
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Anthony Chase
Marina Carr’s Girl on an Altar, currently on offer at the Irish Classical Theatre Company, is a contemporary feminist retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon.
If you are modestly knowledgeable about Greek mythology, the one thing you are most likely to know about Clytemnestra is that she and her lover murdered her husband Agamemnon in the bath.
And maybe you don’t recall even that much.
She does the deed in retaliation for her husband having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind for Troy. Of the ancient versions of this marriage, the most famous and influential is in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. There Clytemnestra is at once an archetypal “bad wife” and a grimly justified avenger: a woman who has stepped into masculine, kingly authority, speaking in the language of divine justice even as the men around her insist on reading their queen as a sex‑corrupted monster.
If Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra is the nightmare queen who butchers her husband in the name of Zeus, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis shows us a very different woman: a furious, articulate mother who sees through the pieties of “necessary” sacrifice and calls the whole enterprise what it is, a bad bargain for men and a death sentence for women.
Carr picks up that thread of maternal fury and ethical clarity while stripping away the supposed religious “necessity” that still props up Agamemnon’s choice in both Aeschylus and Euripides. The result is an entirely human drama about power and patriarchy, and Irish Classical Theatre’s production leans decisively into that human scale.
Girl on an Altar, which opened last week under the direction of Anderson Carr (no relation to the playwright), keeps the murder and the sacrifice but rewrites the woman at the center as a lover who cannot forgive, and cannot quite leave, the man who killed her child.
Here, ICTC artistic director Keelie Sheridan plays Clytemnestra, and her real‑life husband, Jorge Luna, is Agamemnon. When we meet them, they are an apparently happy couple, chatting amiably on their journey to Aulis where, we’re told, their eldest daughter, ten‑year‑old Iphigenia, is to marry the great hero Achilles. Sheridan gives us a wife of animated chatter, while Luna’s Agamemnon listens with taciturn reserve. Clytemnestra is not pleased. After the ceremonies, she fully intends to take her daughter back home until she has reached what Clytemnestra considers the proper age to be married. Fifteen.
What Clytemnestra does not know is that the wedding plan is a lie, a pretext to get her to deliver her daughter to Aulis, where Agamemnon will sacrifice the child to appease the goddess Artemis. Only when the ritual is already underway, the knife raised and the girl on the altar, does she learn the truth.
Marina Carr is one of Ireland’s most formidable contemporary dramatists, best known for folding Greek tragedy and Irish rural gothic into plays like By the Bog of Cats and Hecuba. A child of the Midlands who grew up on both Shakespeare and Sophocles, she has spent the last three decades chronicling wounded families and feral mothers, dragging myth down into the kitchen and the bedroom. Irish Classical Theatre Company has previously staged her very early play, The Mai. It makes sense that a company which has built a reputation on intimate, language‑driven productions is drawn to her work. Girl on an Altar gives them a script that is at once rigorously classical in its bones, disconcertingly domestic in its focus, and unmistakably Irish. The production, here marking the American debut of the play, makes for a relentlessly intelligent and emotionally exacting evening.
Sheridan and Luna show us a marriage that feels at once mythic and painfully recognizable. The production trusts Carr’s dense language and propensity for monologue without ever letting the play collapse into static talk. The result is a staging that honors the mythic structure of the story while making the ethical stakes feel bracingly urgent and contemporary. This is a confident and thought‑provoking theatrical offering. As the drama progresses, we see Sheridan embody the evolving feelings of a woman who must fight back visceral love for a man she cannot forgive. Luna allows proud Agamemnon to harden into obstinacy, imposing repressive power when he cannot win forgiveness from the woman he loves irresistibly.
This duo is supported by an excellent ensemble, each actor sketching a distinct facet of the world around them.
Tabitha Raithel is Cassandra, the Trojan princess now reduced to slavery. Carr promotes Cassandra from Aeschylus’s shattering cameo to a steady presence: a Trojan captive and prophet whose body and speech bear the scars of a war she saw coming and could not stop. Cassandra’s clear‑sightedness is repurposed into a commentary on captivity, trauma, and the refusal to hear women. Raithel plays the role with contained resignation.
In myth, Apollo’s curse means no one believes Cassandra; in Girl on an Altar the curse looks more like patriarchy and empire, the everyday refusal to credit the testimony of an enslaved foreign woman. Cassandra’s presence shifts the story’s center of gravity toward women’s experience of war and male power. She arrives as both war trophy and witness, her pregnancy making her a living ledger of Agamemnon’s violence against Trojan bodies.
For Clytemnestra, the captive princess is simultaneously victim, rival, and the indirect cause of Iphigenia’s death. But by the time Agamemnon consigns his recalcitrant wife to the filthy, unsafe harem, she no longer sees herself as apart from the women kept there; in Sheridan’s performance you can see that dawning recognition harden into shame, as Clytemnestra finally understands that the patriarchy which ruined her daughter has also kept countless nameless women in chains, and that she has been complicit in that machinery.
Darryl Semira’s Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover and, in this version, the father of another daughter with her, offers a mix of wounded pride and wary calculation, a man who knows both the pleasures and the precariousness of occupying the king’s empty place. Paige Batt, as the slave Cilissa, gives the household a watchful, ground‑level intelligence, her imperious presence always reminding us who does the actual labor of this palace. David Marciniak lends Clytemnestra’s father, King Tyndareus, a weary and exasperated authority, suggesting a once powerful patriarch who understands the cost of the bargains his generation has struck.
The setting, described in the program as “Fluid. Sky. Sea. Stars. Wind. Stone. Bronze. Aegean Light.” is designed by scenic and costume designer Valentin Peter Eisele, who fully exploits Irish Classical’s circular space with a simple abstract set. White‑marble-looking surfaces evoke an idea of ancient Greece; large geometric blocks define shifting locations as the actors move them around the central playing area. A red see-through gauze enclosure, suspended above the stage, sketches in palace walls; when the sheer fabric drops to the floor it becomes a circle of blood. Above it, a neon red ring hangs like a skylight or a watchful eye. The fluid space facilitates Anderson Carr’s swift transitions and startling stage pictures.
The costumes, also in shades of white, favor sculptural geometric shapes in quilted fabric. Eisele compresses and stylizes period detail rather than reproducing it literally, so that the actors move like chess pieces in an abstract composition rather than naturalistic figures in a realist world. Moving with ceremonial majesty, the production is visually arresting. The vivid, highly dramatic lighting is by Matt DaVita. The drama is further punctuated by Mason Beggs’s highly effective soundscape.
Under Anderson Carr’s direction, all of these elements build into a tightly unified, steadily intensifying whole; there are no digressions, only the feeling that the story is driving toward a single, unavoidable act. When the murder finally comes, it feels almost abrupt, not a cunningly sprung trap, but the only possible climax of what we have been watching. Carr lets Cassandra narrate the killing she has long foreseen, and it is fitting that this enslaved, disbelieved woman gets the last word. In a play where gods are invoked but never intervene, it is human choices, human cruelties, and human refusals to listen that spill the blood.
