Blanche McIntyre interview: Why we need ancient drama

HOME’s latest guest director, Blanche McIntyre, is ever so slightly late (and extremely apologetic about it) for our morning meeting in Manchester’s smart new arts venue. She just needs a coffee, she explains: last night was the first rehearsal for HOME’s second produced play, epic Greek tragedy The Oresteia.

Having cut her directorial teeth “on the fringe,” McIntyre is keen to point out that her first paid directing job was only three years ago. But that’s not to say that she isn’t already making waves in the theatre world. In 2011, McIntyre was named the Critics’ Circle’s most promising newcomer (a title she shares with the likes of Eddie Redmayne and Sam Mendes) and she has already directed an impressive range of plays to critical acclaim, most recently As You Like It at the Globe.

At HOME, McIntyre is returning to her classical roots (she has a double first in classics from Oxford) to direct Ted Hughes’s 1999 translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a three-part drama first performed in 458 BC. McIntyre describes it as “a story about a spiral of revenge, a blood vendetta that gets out of control.” It is pretty bloody. It sees the king of Argos, Agamemnon, who has sacrificed his daughter to help win the Trojan War, triumphantly returning ten years later only to be murdered by his wife. And that’s just for starters. “It’s also a story about the invention of justice as an idea and how we as a people went from unthinking vendetta into trial by jury, justice, right and wrong – deciding what these ideas are.”

Being part of HOME’s debut season is, understandably, quite a bit of pressure for a relatively young director. “[It’s] terrifying!” McIntyre exclaims. “Brilliant, but terrifying.” But this isn’t the only pressure McIntyre faces with The Oresteia. Despite not having a major London show for over a decade, there have already been two high-profile productions of the play this year, including one which transferred to the West End in August.

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“I want the audience to go on a rollercoaster of a drama, and I want them to come out thinking” – Blanche McIntyre

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So why is there such a sudden fascination with ancient drama? “I think people get interested in Greek theatre when they feel like they’re living in politically turbulent times. And I think there can be moments where there is suddenly an appetite to have things told very straight, very uncompromisingly, in an exhilarating and very powerful way.”

As McIntyre explains, Greek plays were designed to be extremely political and public in a way that we don’t often expect in theatre today. “They are a way in which the city interrogates an issue, decides what it thinks about it, questions what it thinks about it... [Today,] the questions that Manchester is having to face about how it looks after itself and how it governs itself – these seem to be the sort of questions that we ought to be looking at,” says McIntyre. “And of course [Manchester] has this extraordinary long history of agitating for the common good, and of political engagement, so it seems like absolutely the right place partly to be raising these issues at all, but also to be getting the community involved in them.”

Community is certainly crucial to McIntyre’s staging of the play: the six-strong cast is supported by a chorus of 50 local volunteers who have been rehearsing since early June. And this isn’t McIntyre’s first time working in Manchester, either. In 2013, she directed Harold Pinter’s 1957 play The Birthday Party at The Royal Exchange. Just two years on, she is embarking on a very different theatrical adventure, but her vision is clear: “I want [the audience] to go on a rollercoaster of a drama, and I want them to come out thinking.”

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The Oresteia will be on at HOME, Manchester, from Fri 23 Oct to Sat 14 Nov, tickets £29.50-£10