The Water’s Edge

Fourteen years after something terrible happened, an estranged husband and father returns to the family home, with a much younger girlfriend in tow. Theresa Rebeck’s contemporary reworking of the Agamemnon jettisons the chorus, the Trojan War and Clytemnestra’s lover, then leaves its protagonists to work out their grudges and griefs by the edge of a lake.

The resulting family psychodrama centres upon the surpassingly cruel ease with which Richard and Helen’s children, reared in the shade of their mother’s sorrow, are drawn towards their father’s sunny unconcern with the shadows of the past.

Robert Cavanah’s Richard exudes boyish charm, and childish inability to believe that he might ever fail to be beloved, indulged and forgiven. Mark Field, understatedly brilliant as Nate, responds with a hesitant courtesy that slips into a dazzling, defenceless hunger for paternal love. Cressida Trew’s Erica, bristling with suspicion and youthful moral certainty, is a tougher proposition, but the fact that her seduction by a father she initially loathes takes place offstage leaves her character feeling oddly disconnected in the latter stages of the play.

As the drama inevitably darkens, it’s Nate who bears the brunt of the tragedy, disastrously torn between conflicting loyalties and loves. The bloody work of a night leaves him utterly transformed, a stranger to himself, trying to make sense of an altered world. Madeleine Potter’s Helen has the big speech of the evening, delivered with ferocious clarity and intelligence from the crumbling porch. But her son’s hardening eyes and taut, tortured body guarantee that the bloodletting isn’t over.

There are some oddities in this modernised version of an ancient play. Kate Sissons works hard to make an appealing figure of hapless Lucy, but a waitress with a habit of spectacularly putting her foot in it is no doomed prophetess Cassandra. And it seems odd to place a bathtub centre-stage, and then be so squeamishly coy about is uses.

Still, Fiona Morrell’s production manages to replace much that’s lost in translation with a painfully detailed and compassionate portrait of a desperately fragmented modern family. In the lakeside stillness, beautifully lit by Ben Payne, everything that’s hidden gets drawn into the light, and once conflicting truths have been spoken aloud, nothing can avert the coming tragedy.