Carmelo Rifici reinterprets The Oresteia by Aeschylus, restoring its original character as a founding trauma: not an ancient tale, but the threshold at which humanity discovers that violence cannot be eliminated, but must be organised. An exploration of the fragility of our concept of justice and of what we have lost in the transition from the archaic world to logos.

The new LAC production by Carmelo Rifici makes its world premiere, as he chooses to explore the origins of Western democracy through the only trilogy from classical Greece to have survived in its entirety: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, comprising the tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.
At the heart of the work lies the hypothesis that democracy does not arise from a desire for peace, but rather from the need to regulate inescapable violence; the polis, the city-state, is not the alternative to the barbarism of war and vengeance, but its best possible transformation. This idea, already so clear in Aeschylus, casts a melancholic light on our very concept of democracy. On stage, two worlds confront each other: the archaic forces, ancient polytheistic wisdom that embodies the memory of sacrifice, and the abstraction of the logos, under the aegis of a single God, which attempts to contain – rather than overcome – the concept of vengeance. The Athenian court that acquits Orestes of the charge of matricide, thanks to the oratorical and enchanting strategies of Athena, born from the brain of Zeus, shows how, in the light of contemporary history, modern man is the result of a fragile and dangerous compromise, constantly threatened by events, and not the fruit of human wisdom.