Netanyahu in the 'Odyssey': 'Agamemnon' rides the wave of Nolan's success, but it's not enough
The Cameri Theatre's adaptation of 'Agamemnon' moves the familiar Greek tragedy to 2026, turning it into a thriller set entirely on a plane, where the king must decide whether to sacrifice his son in exchange for the release of prisoners. Dror Keren and Michal Uziel provide powerful moments, but the overload of analogies to Israeli politics and contemporary markers weakens the drama and leaves insufficient room for the moral and philosophical questions at its core.
It is doubtful that the Cameri intentionally timed the premiere of 'Agamemnon' to coincide with the arrival of Christopher Nolan's epic blockbuster, 'The Odyssey', in theaters, but it is hard to think of a more successful timing for the theater. With Greek mythology back at the center stage, the encounter between the two works provides an intriguing opportunity to return to the figure of the controversial king, to ponder the philosophical questions presented by his story, and to see the story of the Athens-Troy war from several angles.
While Nolan turns to the big screen with 70mm IMAX cameras and a budget of $250 million to recreate - supposedly - a world from about 3,000 years ago, the Cameri makes the opposite move and brings Agamemnon into the present. The new adaptation by Shahar Pinkas and director Irad Rubinstein takes Aeschylus's tragedy as a starting point and moves it straight to 2026, into a sweaty political thriller. In the new production, Agamemnon (Dror Keren) is presented as the leader of Athens, who takes off for a diplomatic 'summit' in Sicily with the goal of finally deciding the long-running campaign, while alongside this hangs the political question of whether it is actually good for him.
But in the middle of the flight, everything changes when the leader of Troy offers him a shocking deal: to sacrifice his son Orestes (Yonatan Hornchik) in exchange for all the prisoners of war in his hands. Inside the sealed passenger cabin, when the characters are all trapped together and there is nowhere for anyone to run, Agamemnon is required to make a decision that will change his life completely. The choice to place the mythological struggle inside a modern passenger plane creates an immediate sense of pressure, but it is hard to shake the feeling that the potential of the situation is pushed aside in favor of the need to update almost every detail of the plot to 2026.
Rubinstein and Pinkas overload the story with political analogies directly to the Israeli reality. Agamemnon becomes a leader resembling Benjamin Netanyahu, and at times also Donald Trump. He is presented as a control freak who avoids difficult journalistic interviews, and his desire to remove a maritime threat echoes the discourse around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. When his son joins the flight in the middle of an interview that goes wrong, the news anchor even jabs him about the child going on vacation during a war - and at the state's expense, no less.
The hints do not end with politics. The production is loaded with contemporary markers: a notes app on the phone, AirPods, Wi-Fi on the plane, and even the mythological oracle, which becomes here in a nice move an artificial intelligence program on a smartphone. Agamemnon's son uploads a protest song against his father to YouTube, and he, for his part, demands it be removed, and the dialogues also insist on reminding us again and again where we are, with sentences about 'a war that has been going on for more than 700 days', '133 hostages', and 'a barbaric enemy that took prisoners and is not willing to talk about their return'. Instead of trusting the audience to find the connections between myth and reality themselves, the production marks them with a highlighter.
The insistence on 2026 also creates logical problems of its own from time to time. One of the possibilities that arise during the crisis relies on a trick that might have been accepted in a less documented world, but in an era where almost every movement is filmed and saved, it is hard to believe it would have lasted more than a few minutes. While the original tragedy - in which, by the way, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter - deals with poignant philosophical and moral questions, the current adaptation shifts the center of gravity to the figure of the leader and to the way power shapes his decisions. And precisely when this engagement moves from slogans to the people themselves, the actors also get room to shine, and in the moments when the analogies subside a bit and the production lets the characters lead, the drama finally gains interest.
Michal Uziel, who plays Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, is responsible for some of the most stable and moving moments in the play. With sensitive and charged acting, she manages to extract from the tangle of metaphors a true maternal heartbreak. Dror Keren, in the role of Agamemnon, also gradually sheds the familiar mannerisms and presents a man torn and terrified. The set designed by Eran Atzmon supports the compressed atmosphere, but the inherent limitation of a plane space creates a stage that is too static and devoid of significant physical movement - when the attempt to solve this with a rotating part of the stage feels mostly forced.
There is no doubt that many of the Cameri's patrons, who these days are also identified with the street adjacent to the theater building, will find quite a bit to love in 'Agamemnon'. But after the Cameri already proved, for example in the tight and successful adaptation of 'Oedipus', that they know how to approach classics with wisdom and emotion, precisely here the attempt to ride the waves of local current events becomes a weight. Unlike Nolan's 'Odyssey', which trusts the viewer to identify for themselves how much the ancient myths still speak about our world, 'Agamemnon' insists on pointing out again and again who exactly the king is supposed to remind us of. But there is no real need to convince us that he is Netanyahu, Trump, or any other politician: Agamemnon is Agamemnon - another man with power who uses it and is a warmonger, and that is interesting, relevant, and disturbing enough even without spoon-feeding us the comparison. It is easier to digest food when it is not shoved down your throat.
