Ninette de Valois and Terence Gray’s Oresteia of Aeschylus

Abstract Chapter 3 centres on the opening production of Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre: a 1926 rendition of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy that ushered in a new period of artistic experimentation on the Cambridge stage. It recovers the debt that this Oresteia staging owed to the theatre’s choreographic director, the former Diaghilev dancer Ninette de Valois. De Valois, working closely alongside the production’s translator, strove to bring the textual cadences of Aeschylus’s choral odes to the 1926 stage by drawing on a nuanced choreographic aesthetic that she recognized as fundamental to Ballets Russes works. Together, the chapter shows, Gray and de Valois offered a new understanding of how to stage the choric element of classical tragedy, ultimately catching the attention of a series of prominent verse dramatists—including Gordon Bottomley and W. B. Yeats—and changing the way in which they conceived of the relationship between poetic expression and dancing bodies, particularly en masse.