The published version has been re­worked after the production but is firmly based in that original production. Rehm in his introduction says: ‘I was forced to evaluate the decisions that had been reached under pressure of an impending performance ... Countless minor changes were made in the dialogue. More importantly, sections that had been concentrated or cut in the choruses were reintroduced and developed.’

The choruses are the most controversial part of this translation. It is in them that our own theatrical experience is so deficient. It is difficult for us to imagine a ‘play’ in which so much is done by music and dance. Opera and the stage musical are not much help, we simply don’t know the tradition.

Rehm has taken the kinds of liberties which students are not encouraged to enjoy. He takes the words and sets them out in patterns on the page, choreographing the utterances to realise emphases, changes of pace and tone, themes and sustaining images. The result looks, at first glance, like some of the more meretricious uses of free verse. But the words on the page demand to be read aloud and they work on the imagination to create the kind of movement (rhythmical, complex, often syncopated) which gave the Greek chorus its power and importance, its own distinctive medium of drama.

In the formal lamentation over the dead in the second play (The Choephoroi, which Rehm translates From the Dead) the responses are given capitalised key words (FATHER, CHILDREN, TROY, HIGH, WELCOMED, KING, ZEUS, SACRIFICE, EARTH). The same typographical device is used elsewhere in choruses, giving an effect more of a musical and a dance score than of verbal linearity.

Contrasting with the chorus is dialogue which is accurate and spare, as lightly muscled as those statues of Greek kouroi. Rehm has a poet’s ear for language that is minimal in size but rich in effect. The first three lines of The Agamemnon are written entirely in monosyllables. The dialogue throughout is an extraordinary combination of discipline and energy.

The Hawthorn Press is to be congratulated for publishing a work of this kind. The layout is clear and helpful (though the long list of errata and addenda indicates sloppiness in the final proof checking). This is the kind of translation which will enliven the work of Greekless students attempting to get some feel for the working of a wildly foreign dramatic form. It is also a text to be recommended to professional companies with the enterprise and nerve to take on The Oresteia.