Marina Carr has taken as her starting point the Greek history of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus but this is not a conventional retelling of the story of the mother whose daughter is sacrificed to provide the becalmed Greek fleet with a wind to take them to Troy. 

It starts with rivalry for command with Agamemnon pitched against Achilles.  Clytemnestra (Eileen Walsh) is told to prepare her ten year old daughter Iphigenia for a marriage of alliances to Achilles. This she feels  is not a good fate for a ten year old but much worse is in store for her child.  Iphigenia’s siblings Orestes and Electra are twin babies but none of the children are seen in Carr’s version. 

Through descriptive narrative with her freed slave maid Cilissa (Kate Stanley-Brennan) acting as chorus and messenger, Clytemnestra, when hearing that Agamemnon’s soldiers have taken Iphigenia, runs to the cliff top where the altar has been prepared for human sacrifice.  Like a lamb to the slaughter, Agamemnon carries his daughter and then slits her throat. It is deeply shocking and a crime against women, graphically described in Girl on an Altar. 

Ten years later, Agamemnon (David Walmsley) returns to find his wife has taken a lover, his cousin Aegisthus (Daon Broni) who has reason to hate Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, the sons of Atreus, brother to Aegisthus’s father Thyestes.  Deprived of the Mycenaean throne by Atreus, Thyestes had an affair with Atreus’s wife Aerope.  Atreus took revenge by killing Thyestes’s sons and serving them up to their father in a pie.  In Carr’s play, Agamemnon accuses Aegisthus of being , “Child of Child Eaters, madness and revenge whirling in his wolf shark veins.”  Maybe from Agamemnon’s viewpoint, it is ok to kill children but not to eat them! 

The mystery here is the lingering sexual attraction between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon which overrides her hatred for his having killed her daughter.  In the original it is an instruction from the Gods but here Agamemnon talks about his leadership calling himself Zeus Agamemnon and claims daughter slaughter is an act of military prowess.  It is disgusting.  Agamemnon is similarly smitten with Clytemnestra, “There is nothing I would not do to have your good opinion again,” he says.  “I want to give you another Iphigenia.” is his introduction to a passionate, sexual scene.  So much of what drives Agamemnon is kingship, territorial gain and sexual jealousy.