The Cambridge Greek Play

This week Cambridge students are taking part in a production of the Greek tragedy Electra, continuing a 100-year-old tradition of Classical drama at the University.

The Cambridge Greek Play Committee has staged triennial productions of Greek tragedies and comedies, performed in the original language, in a major public theatre for over a century. The Greek Play is now established as the most important and high-profile production in the student drama calendar; it receives national and international media coverage and attracts audiences from all over the country.

In 1998, the Cambridge Greek Play presented Euripides' Trojan Women to great critical acclaim and an extraordinary audience response. This year's production draws on the expertise and experience of the same professionals - director Jane Montgomery, composer Keith Clouston and designer Michael Spencer.

The Greek Play is committed to making Greek drama accessible to as many students and as wide an audience as possible. For the first time the production will be accompanied by a simultaneous English translation of the Greek, using surtitles. The production is further supported by a full series of lectures and workshops, together with a comprehensive schools' outreach programme. For the first time the Greek Play will be accompanied by a weekend symposium, Complex Electra, which will discuss aspects of Electra in myth, text and performance.

Sophocles' Electra is an examination of grief and revenge. Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks at Troy, lies dead, murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. Nine years on, their daughter Electra still mourns for her father. Her only hope is the return of her exiled brother Orestes to exact revenge. But how can it be right to avenge a father by killing a mother?

Sophocles' amazing tragedy puts this moral dilemma in the domestic sphere of the dysfunctional family and the disrupted household, creating in its perfect balance and dramatic tension one of the most brilliant and harrowing of all Greek dramas.