The major problem with asking the audience to act as jury is that they know it isn’t real. However engaging the production is, however well immersed they become into its world, they still know no one is really going to die as a result of their vote, and so the whole exercise becomes a purely academic one.

Full Tilt address this issue by showing the audience the consequences of their decision in a brief but emotive coda. And while the point still stands that said consequences aren’t real, and no one in the audience is going to endure a lifetime of guilt over them, the vote and the coda act as a live demonstration of themes that are repeated and reinforced throughout the production.

Orestes believed he was carrying out justice when he killed his mother the Queen, but he failed to foresee the injustice his actions would heap upon her subjects. The women believe they are carrying out justice by punishing Orestes for his crime, but they turn to kidnapping and other acts of terror in order to do so. And finally, the audience declares what the majority believe to be just, and is in turn brought face to face with the injustice that decision brings about.

It isn’t an easy decision, either; Full Tilt layer the apparently black-and-white issue of matricide with class and gender issues, so that far from simply passing judgement on Orestes, the audience must also pick sides in much weightier debates. Both sides constantly spout self-righteous dogma, either with victimised vitriol or phony PR smiles, so it’s difficult if not impossible to develop sympathy towards either party’s plight. They also hammer home their arguments with a degree of repetition that reinforces the issues only up to a point, after which its rhetorical value is exhausted and it begins to feel like Chinese water torture.

Of course the audience still won’t put in as much thought as they would if lives really were on the line, but Full Tilt ensure that the issues are sufficiently complex that even making an arbitrary decision requires a modicum of reflection – which forces each audience member to define, in whatever small way, their own idea of justice. While you won’t leave wracked with guilt, you may leave knowing yourself a little better.

Using Ted Hughes’ translation that purges Racine’s text of its poetic exuberance, Hytner re-presents the play without visual pomp. Bob Crowley’s stunning, minimalist set, including Troezen’s indoor, cave-like court on one side and a panorama of blue sky on the other, fits Hytner’s approach. After all, for Hytner’s production, the set serves as an abstract space where desires are conscripted and made to interact with one another.

Incestuous desire is, obviously, not Hytner’s focus. It is those suffering from it that matter. Phèdre’s infatuation for stepson Hippolytus and Hippolytus’s love for African-princess-turned-political-criminal Aricia are equally unlawful and not declared until Theseus’s reported demise stirs up the question of succession. ‘Love’ becomes a tool to fabricate political alliances.

In Phèdre the backlash of these untimely, politico-erotic proclamations is severe, leading to fatal jealousy and gory deaths. Helen Mirren’s Phèdre is not just a femme fatale, but disturbed and vulnerable, Mirren revives Phèdre with psychological complexity and deadly anguish—as if there were a time bomb ticking inside her frail body waiting to explode. She approaches Dominic Cooper’s Hippolytus with a seemingly political intention refraining herself from touching him. Soon after, to Phèdre, it seems Cooper’s godlike presence becomes the embodiment of unimaginable carnal sins, for which she falls victim. Phèdre’s outburst of incestuous fantasies is, thus, inevitable and ends with her lavishing kisses on Hippolytus’s neck, a sexually perverse ordeal that turns the willful and dignified prince into stone. In absence of his stepmother, Hippolytus hysterically rubs off Phèdre’s kisses with water. Though subtle, this scene of sexual animosity is brilliantly delivered.

Hytner’s production also benefits much from the powerful supporting cast of Margaret Tyzack and John Shrapnel . Tyzack’s forceful and composed Oenone is a brilliant theatrical foil to a tumultuous Phèdre. Her malice is coupled with mother-like attachment to Phèdre as she controls and re-channels the queen’s perverse desire for political gain. If Tyzack is the star in the opening scenes, Shrapnel is the one to drive the momentum in this domestic tragedy. His blood-soaked Théramène delivers unto superstitious, short-tempered Theseus (Stanley Townsend) the precise description of Hippolytus’s cursed death in a calm, soothing tone that unexpectedly breaks into a soul-wrenching ‘scream’ and ‘roar.’ The nightmarish vision is complete: Mirren reappears pale as a ghost ostracizing herself by confessing incest as Aricia slowly drags Hippolytus’s mutilated corpse in a sack tainting the stage ruby red.

The only flaw in Hytner’s Phèdre, it seems, is the missing chemistry between Cooper’s Hippolytus and Ruth Negga’s Aricia. In the end, Mirren’s soulful performance touches our hearts—not the unconsummated love of the young couple. Phèdre’s passion, to us, is more universal than mere incest, and we find ourselves sympathising with the corpse left un-mourned on stage.

This is the Globe’s first bash at a Greek tragedy, and Helen blossoms impressively in the open air. The set may look like something put together for a school play (tinselly shades of JATATD), but its multiple levels give the players scope to belt frantically about the stage without falling foul of the theatre’s sightlines. Frank McGuinness has produced a text that rambles cheekily between high tragic diction and colloquial bluntness, and Deborah Bruce’s company romp gleefully among its quirky, quicksilver twists and turnings.

Penny Downie’s Helen is a skittishly imperious ageing beauty, who’s been on her own too long to fret about the moral niceties of getting her man back, and getting home pronto. She’s matched by Paul McGann as Menelaus, an incorrigible chancer who’s managed to come through a disastrous war with his considerable charm still intact. And in a production that wears its irreverence on its sleeve, heavenly spokespersons Castor and Pollux (Fergal McElherron and James Lailey) appear like be-winged versions of Paul and Barry Chuckle, cheerfully elucidating semi-divine destinies while grappling with a range of uncooperative props.

This is Euripides without tears, a happy ending snatched from catastrophe, and the funniest Greek tragedy you’re likely to come across. It’s left to a self-mockingly lugubrious chorus, and Ian Redford’s thoughtful servant to hang onto a slender shred of gravitas amid the jollity. Not all wars are fought for the right reasons, they remind us, and good people suffer terribly for bad causes. But such lowering reflections take a back-seat in this irresistibly upbeat reading of a play that celebrates unlikely second chances, and reconciliation against all the odds.

The First World War setting of Jack Shepherd’s naturalistic production makes it all seem frighteningly possible. In a dingy field hospital, shell-shocked and dying soldiers, and the women wearily tending them, provide the appalled, grieving and feverishly delusional voice of the tragic chorus. Instinctive regimental loyalties replace self-preservation and logic in the minds of traumatised Tommies. And their underscore of tuneless whistling and mirthless laughter suffuses the drama with the mutedly gut-wrenching music of men past hope.

A slow start and a subdued first movement are ratcheted up into something like a political thriller centering upon Toby Wharton’s Teucer, a public schoolboy in khaki, desperately clinging to untenable moral absolutes amid ethical and emotional carnage. He receives first rate support from the character actors in the company, with John Giles as a repulsively pompous Menelaus, and Dan Mullane as Agamemnon, scarred, scared, vindictive and possessed of a laugh like a death rattle.

Matthew Sim’s Odysseus wanders and watches, lighting his roll-ups with tell-tale shaking hands, exhausted beyond vengeance or triumphalism. As his divine confidante Athena, Jody Watson offers damage-limitation rather than salvation, appearing ex machina in a blood-stained nurse’s uniform. And Iarla McGowan makes a convincingly shattered hero of the suicidal Ajax: his detailed and understated performance reveals the charismatic and loved leader, the careful professional soldier, as well as the embittered victim of fate.

Ajax is playing in repertory with Macbeth and A Skull in Connemara, and the company have the attentiveness, authority and gravitas of a proper acting ensemble. In their grimy, bloodied hands, Sophocles’ drama acquires an unpretentious, slightly battered and totally compelling integrity.

‘We read all the Greek tragedies, and we thought this one is very exciting, it’s quite funny and it’s quite accessible because it’s fairly domestic, it’s fairly modern. We felt like the characters had a place in the minds of modern young people. It’s not really about gods making things happen. It’s about everybody having collective responsibility for something going very wrong, and everyone being both at fault and admirable in different ways. There’s a kind of moral complexity about it that suits the way we think nowadays. It’s got great potential to be exciting and riveting and profound and sort of philosophical. I think it’s about how human beings react to things, and get things wrong, and how those reactions create a tragedy.

Katherine Tozer as Phaedra. Photo by Bridget Jones.

And how does the often-troublesome ancient chorus fit into this modern, emotionally-realistic world? ‘It’s only a small chorus’ Mike tells me, ‘only four people doing the job of a larger group. But when we asked Timberlake to write this new version she was clearly really keen on the choruses, really excited about their poetic and dramatic potential. And the words she’s written for them are great. Some of them really work with song, really work as lyrics, and a couple of them feel like they just take off into a more choreographic kind of world’.

Next door, the chorus are starting to warm up, singing and stretching together, tuning instruments, pulling faces at each other and laughing. ‘We do lots and lots of games, and playing’ explains Mike. Then he chuckles: ‘we were all being zombies yesterday morning – wanting to really engage a sense of naughtiness, mischief, irreverence and provocation in the chorus. We don’t want them all to be goodies and just stand and listen’.

Katherine Tozer and David Burke (Phaedra and Theseus). Photo by Bridget Jones.

The sense of fun in the rehearsal room is infectious, and I’m soon giggling along with the performers, but as the morning progresses it also becomes clear that these games have a serious aspect. ‘Obviously you have to share focus properly. We’ve done a lot of balancing space stuff, because you have to be very aware of where you are in relation to other characters, particularly as a chorus. We’ve done a lot of games where you’re balancing space, and getting sensitive to what different aspects of the space mean, and what it means to cross someone or be at the opposite side of the space from someone, or to be close’.

The four-woman chorus (‘one of them’s played by a man’) certainly seem to be thriving on this playful approach to the job. They sing, dance, strum guitars and bang drums, improvise, swap clothes and cheerfully muck about, reciting Euripides all the while. Their manner is laid back, focussed, gently self-mocking and thoroughly down to earth. And that, Mike confirms, is an important part of what the company’s about. ‘We wanted to tell ancient stories in fun and exciting and riveting ways. The last show, Out of Chaos, which we toured around Europe, was a multi-lingual, comic rollercoaster of a storytelling show that moved between modern anecdotes and ancient Greek myths. We were exploring the connection between the little interactions that happen on the Tube between strangers and the massive interactions that happened between gods and mortals in Greek myths, and how there’s a lot in common, actually – the way we tell stories now is the way we told stories thousands of years ago. The comedy’s the same. The human interactions are very much the same’.

. Ann Penfold and Katherine Tozer (Nurse and Phaedra). Photo by Bridget Jones.

‘They’re such brilliant, simple stories, these Greek stories’, he continues, ‘but they often get clouded in a mist of incomprehensibility. We want to create generous theatre, we just want it to be really exciting, and interesting, and fun, and moving if possible – and not too long’.

I quite liked the fact that Jason’s Argonauts were dressed like something out of Blake’s 7. I quite liked the comedy footy match played out between opposing armies (with both taking dives). I liked the whirl of ribbons and lights that took us to a marketplace in Medea’s vaguely South American homeland. I was game for a sing-along and a play-along and a dance. I even joined in to the extent of confirming my suspicions that professional handmaidening must be a pretty tedious job. But what I really couldn’t stand was the officious and incessant pestering of supposedly ‘hidden’ actors who made up a sizeable portion of the alleged ‘audience’.

These egregious nuisances – easy to spot because they know the words to the songs – were evidently under the impression that their job was to chivvy and/or bully the rest of us into compliant communal enthusiasm. I tried as hard as I could to lurk among the non-joiners, politely embarrassed, like the kid at a party who’d rather read a book. Unfortunately for me, my persecutors weren’t taking the hint.

If I want to do dance-aerobics in the middle of the night – well I don’t. But if I did, the idea that my goodwill might be engaged by much grabbing of my hand and vigorous shoving in the ribs (some of which actually hurt) seems pretty far-fetched. I’m prepared to believe that no-one meant to offend me (and certainly not hurt me), but this over-zealous evangelism left me grinding my teeth, thinking vaguely vengeful thoughts and longing for a way out.

In all fairness, the last four hours of this marathon all-nighter may well have been amazing. There were certainly hints that events might be about to take a turn for the darker, with a bloody-mouthed Medea wandering through a dramatically-lit rave, dispatching her brothers/bodyguards/army in her overpowering passion for Jason. I’m afraid I’ll never know – having escaped at 2am, bruised, exhausted – and with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Participatory theatre is hard. Especially when the audience don’t want to play ball. But I remain to be convinced that relentless pestering, emotional blackmail and the odd physical shove onto the dancefloor is the answer. There are many engaging and entertaining and striking things about Hotel Medea, all sadly undermined the amateurishly aggressive attitude of certain participants towards innocent, and justifiably underwhelmed punters. Upon mature reflection – maybe I should have taken my grandma.

Aspasia Kralli’s production, choreographed by Zoe Chatziantoniou, uses the bodies of performers in conjunction and in space to explore the circling story of the ancient tragedy. Malamatenia Gotsi’s Jocasta begins as a poised, straight-backed girl staring fixedly into a mirror, but as the story unravels her body is transformed through the repeated contortions of copulation, birth and death. Meletis Ilias as Laius and Giorios Tsambourakis’ Oedipus are like macho mirror-images , locking horns in a violent death-struggle that is almost an act of desire.

The regular interventions of bird-woman-man-prophet Tiresias add little to the tension of the drama, and tend to slow the narrative to a stately, ritual plod. But Kostis Koronaios manages the difficult task of morphing from “shepherd” to “another shepherd” with consummate skill, and his subsequent transfiguration into the childless Queen of Corinth is marvellously detailed and authoritative.

The show exploits some shrewd symbolic insights, as the scarlet cord that binds mother and newborn child becomes the death weapon of Laius and the noose of Jocasta’s suicide. However, some of the drama’s central images – notably the recurring mirror – aren’t exploited so consistently, and the welter of clothes that tumbles from the sky to symbolise Thebes’ plague seems fairly arbitrary.

Working without words, the performers do not make the customary direct appeal for audience sympathy. Their inexorable progress through the sequence of events that leads to self-destruction is enacted with single-minded honesty that makes moral wrangling or hang-wringing irrelevant. Swift, stark and terse, Seeking Oedipus is an examination of tragic destiny to which the audience is witness, but not judge.

As Besouro, Daon Broni is cool and elusive, speaking eloquently but giving little away, except his unshakeable, invulnerable self-possession. By contrast, Greg Hicks hurls himself bodily into the role of Gordilho, the corrupt chief of police responsible for the shooting of Besouro’s mother. He stalks the stage, swaggering, snarling and paranoid, erotically fascinated by the death he deals on the streets.

Noah Birksted-Breen’s production sometimes seems haphazard, but its rough and tumble minimalism can make resonant symbols of the most simple objects. Frances Viner’s text throbs with images of passionate surrender to the sensuous pleasures of love and hate and vengeance, though some passages of exposition slow the show’s pace to a crawl. The most powerful moments are often almost wordless, as the chorus makes a circle of music and whirling bodies, tumbling and crashing like waves.

In Blood reaches a crescendo of Dionysiac intensity as Gordilho, achingly vulnerable in borrowed street-clothes, is lured into the dizzying street-fights of the roda. The subsequent frenzy of flying bodies and earth-shaking rhythms is gripping, unearthly, unpredictable and palpably dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that enthusiastic use of a smoke machine tripped the fire alarm, and we all had to be evacuated to the safety of the nearest pub.

Perhaps inevitably, everything that followed was a mite anticlimactic. But with a fearless company of astonishing physical power, a compellingly gritty setting, and pulsing, spine-tingling music, In Blood is a sensitive and thrilling response to the hard questions and total theatricality of ancient tragedy.

In Blood: The Bacchae is at the Arcola until January 31: www.arcolatheatre.com

Watch the video trailer on YouTube.

Photograph bottom: Photo by Alastair Muir

Daniel Winder’s modern-dress production is sometimes impressively liturgical, and sometimes wilfully slow, with flashes of hallucinatory visual excess. A couple of episodes of not-very-passionate dumbshow add little to Hughes’ spare, powerful verse, but some of the show’s other effects work much better, and Alcestis’ funeral procession spilling out into the Covent Garden night is a wonderful collision between worlds.

The chorus of three are gossipy, grudge-bearing neighbours, vulgarly curious beneath their funereal finery. The show’s physical score sometimes pushes these hardworking actresses beyond their comfort and competence, but their singing is glorious, and they tackle the verse with intelligent, northern-vowelled bluntness. Chorus leader Emma Garrett is a figure of compelling authority, stoical, defiant and utterly unglamorous, roughly admonishing Shaun French’s Admetos to ‘meet Necessity with a cheerful face’.

Sarah Kempton as Alcestis is in another world from the beginning, pale and self-possessed and impatient of her husband’s sorrow. John Harwood’s Pheres, doddery, slovenly and incorrigible, makes an unexpectedly eloquent case for an old man clinging to life, and his exchanges with his son over Alcestis’ bier sparkle with a shared sense of grim humour. Christina Gallon and Elizabeth Boag, as Nursemaid and Servant, handle their big speeches with skill, while Matthew Mellelieu and Tom Deplae exploit the hilarity of Heracles’ play-within-a-play to hysterical, discomfiting effect.

The acoustics of The Actor’s Church are distinctly boomy, and the whole company works hard to make themselves heard and understood. Hughes’ gut-wrenching poetry rolls around the cavernous church like rumbling Olympian thunder. And the sacred space is an excellent foil for the play’s howls of bereft despair, and bellows of boozy good-fellowship. Iris Theatre’s Alcestis is an oddly-compounded interpretation of a complicated, tragi-comic drama, but it builds towards a measured and satisfying finale with tragedy, temporarily, averted.

Alcestis is at The Actor’s Church, Covent Garden until 15 November: www.iristheatre.com

Photo top: Anne-Marie Piazza, Emma Garrett, Julie Gilby in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.

Photo bottom: John Harwood in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.

The chorus have been grazing on Beckett and Sophocles. Ruminantly, feverishly, raptly and wide-eyed they engage in rituals of pollution, cleansing and expiation. There’s birthing, and breeding, and inexplicable infection, and a herd bound together by solitary terror. Hip-swaying and intent, they spin what might be sought-for answers, and might be whole new questions out of their sinuous, spasming bodies.

Some of the symbolic threads are strung pretty tight, even to the point of having snapped. The man with the limp might be the farmer and might be Oedipus, but neither his herds nor his chorus seem to recognise his gait. At times the text(s) and the physical score feel like unfamiliar dance partners, awkwardly uncertain who’s leading. They tread on each other’s toes, bump foreheads and occasionally jerk the atmospheric rhythms of the show off-balance. But despite clumsy moments, the effect of the whole is oddly, hypnotically beautiful.

This is densely imagined and experienced dance-drama, evocative and tantalising and paradoxically satisfying. Perhaps the only Oedipus who matters is the one behind our eyes, challenged to find a personal meaning in this riddling ritual. The Cows Come Home is an enigmatic experience that resonates in some place deeper and stranger than the intellect, transcending narrative obscurity to achieve a beguiling synthesis of music and image and motion.