Award-winning, Manchester-born Lyndsey Marshal heads the cast as Clytemnestra when Home in Manchester stages Oresteia from October 23 to November 14.
Bolton-based Simon Trinder, starring this autumn in ITV’s three-part drama Midwinter of the Spirit, is Orestes.
The six-strong cast, with actors playing multiple roles crossing age and gender, will be accompanied by a chorus of more than 50 Greater Manchester residents at each performance.
Marshal—who starred on the big screen alongside Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman in director Stephen Daldry’s The Hours in 2002—takes the leading role in Blanche McIntyre’s take on The Oresteia, Ted Hughes’s translation of Aeschylus’ epic drama about war, bloodshed, revenge, and justice, which was first performed in 458BC.
Remarkably it is her first stage appearance in her home city. She will appear in the cinema in 2016 in major British crime drama Trespass Against Us alongside Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson and Rory Kinnear.
Trinder is a veteran of more than 50 plays for BBC Radio 4 and has credits at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court Theatre, the Hampstead Theatre and the Young Vic. Regionally, he played Caliban opposite Pete Postlethwaite’s Prospero in The Tempest at the Royal Exchange in 2007 directed by Greg Hersov and Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest at Bristol Old Vic in 2005.
Blanche McIntyre will direct. HOME will distil Hughes’s version of The Oresteia, first performed at the National Theatre in 1999, into a stripped-back 100 minutes.