In 1905, when W.B. Yeats asked Gilbert Murray to translate Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, he received a negative response. Murray would not, he replied, translate the play for an Irish audience because ‘it is a play with nothing Irish about it’. Yeats would eventually succeed in ‘turning [Oedipus Tyrannus] into an Abbey play’ in 1926 with his own translation, but by 2017 it was not Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus that had something Irish about it, but Aeschylus’ Oresteia. H.’s take on the myth of the House of Atreus (with M. Cuypers) spans two published texts: a complete Oresteia, and two versions of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, one closely observant of the corrupt manuscript tradition and the other a ‘more performable’ version of the play for the stage. H., who was for ten years the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Ireland, translated the Oresteia and Iphigenia in Aulis in the wake of directing Euripides’ Bacchae and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus for the same company because Aeschylus, as he notes in the introduction, was the tragedian he had ‘not yet tackled’.

H.’s plays are part of a 2017 interest in the Oresteia from a number of Irish authors (such as C. Tóibín and M. Carr), a distinct rebranding of the 2015 trend for Oresteias in England (at the Almeida and the Globe in London, and at Manchester's HOME). Like Tóibín's novel version, House of Names, H.’s Oresteia gives a distinctly Irish flavour to his stagings of both Argos and Aulis. In the Argos of H.’s Oresteia the House of Atreus is repeatedly not a house but a ‘clan’, and the attendants of Athena, who in H.’s version command silence and lead the furies from the stage, introduce language reminiscent of the conversation surrounding changes to the law on abortion that took place in 2013 (between the first performances of the texts in 2011 and 2012 and their publication in 2017). The furies are both children and not-children (paides apaides) throughout Aeschylus’ play, but in H.’s version they become not only not-children, but not-yet-children: ‘Never bearing – / Nor yet being children’ (p. 219).

But whereas Tóibín's version focuses on the figure of Clytemnestra, whose story occupies the first part of the novel, H. devotes considerable energy to Iphigenia, writing not one but two plays about her, both translations of Euripides’ text. Euripides’ double interest in the play (in his Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris) becomes a double interest for H. too, and both playwrights do not only tell the story twice, but radically alter its ending. While both of Euripides’ plays about Iphigenia as they stand (with the 98 spurious lines that close Iphigenia in Aulis) demand that the young woman somehow escape her sacrifice, in H.’s version the plot is rewritten, the death of the young woman transformed into something that takes place onstage and is therefore unavoidable. For H. Iphigenia's death is ‘the imperative of the tragedy's action’, as he notes in the introduction to the volume.

H. and Classic Stage Ireland were not alone in seeing Iphigenia's death as imperative not only to Euripides’ plays but also to Aeschylus’ trilogy: R. Icke's 2015 production at the Almeida prefaced the action of the Oresteia with the action of the Iphigenia in Aulis, and Tóibín's Clytemnestra jumps into a particularly galling account of Iphigenia's unwilling death little more than a page into the novel. The emphasis on Iphigenia's death may be a modern phenomenon (just as to read the plays as a cycle is a modern approach: Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca all take an interest in a specific figure in the Oresteia rather than taking the three plays together as a cycle, and the plays were not read as a trilogy until 1856, in the first modern staging), but this completeness is also unusual for the Irish stage. The Oresteia has only had one complete production of the entire cycle in Ireland, at the Gate Theatre in the 1930s.

H.’s decision to bring Iphigenia's death on stage and therefore to deny the possibility of her resurrection is not simply evidence of his grappling with a difficult Euripidean manuscript tradition. It also testifies to his interest in translating the Oresteia as a text for performers and in ‘unpacking Aeschylus’ dense language into lines that are actable and comprehensible to a modern theatre audience’. In this, H. has clearly met his match in Cuypers, who asks in her opening note on the Iphigenia in Aulis: ‘Does any of this [textual criticism on the play] matter to a director?’. Classic Stage Ireland and H.’s Shakespearean leanings (H. published Acting Shakespeare's Language in 2015) have a role to play in this investment in performability. His Agamemnon begins not with the long-winded prayer to the gods that occupies the opening seven lines of Aeschylus’ play, but with a surprised spondee (‘A year!’), echoing the ‘Who's there?’ that opens Shakespeare's Hamlet.

H.’s concessions to performability are without doubt effective, but his versions trade Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ political specificity for contemporary resonance. In H.’s play-texts, various kinds of political territory are translated using the single concept ‘home’, removing the need for the kinds of antiquated terminology often used by translators to differentiate between types of territory now defunct. Cassandra's distant and defeated poleos becomes a ‘home’ in H.’s Agamemnon, and the Furies’ ritual seat (hedra) is simply their ‘home’ in his Eumenides. In this insistence on the role of the home (rather than the house) in his versions of these Greek tragedies, H. writes his scripts not only into the first wave of resurgences of the myth of the House of Atreus on stages across Britain and Ireland from 2015. He also carves out a space for them in a second wave of more distant Oresteia echoes focused on the idea of home – a sudden abundance of plays in 2016–2017 set in childhood gardens, that included plays like Albion (2017) and Things I Know To Be True, a 2016 co-production by the State Theatre Company of South Australia and Frantic Assembly. A simple story about the absence of the youngest daughter in a family, the return home of grown-up children and their eventual implication in the death of their mother, Things I Know To Be True had obvious echoes of the Oresteia. H.’s relevant, performable versions show not only that there is something Irish about the House of Atreus after all, but that there is something global and relentlessly contemporary about the ancient story of a home.