A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The decade between 1980 and 1990 saw four important productions of Aeschylus’s Oresteia: Karolos Koun’s Oresteia (1980), Peter Stein’s Die Orestie (1980), Peter Hall’s The Oresteia (1981) and Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1990–92). This chapter seeks to provide something of an overview of these productions, with a particular focus on some of the con- trasts among them. While these were not the only productions of the Oresteia produced in the late twentieth century, they are all marked by the importance of their directors and their theatre companies. (For a list of productions of Agamemnon, see the appendix to Macintosh et al. 2005; for productions of the Oresteia in its entirety between 1950 and 2000, see Taplin 2002, 10–11, and for a relatively complete list, visit the database at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford.) Each director stands pre-eminent among the theatre practitioners in their respective countries, shaping the development of the theatre traditions within their national borders but also beyond those borders. And for each of these directors their versions of Aeschylus’s Oresteia are numbered as being among the most significant productions of their careers, thus providing a valuable touchstone not only for the reception of ancient Greek drama on stage, but also the development of modern thea- tre performance traditions in Europe (though perhaps England, for a variety of reasons, ought not to be considered European). Karolos Koun’s Oresteia (1980) Koun’s production of the Oresteia has a much more complicated relationship to the past than the other three productions. As Sidiropoulou observes, the productions of Hall, Stein and Mnouchkine were “created within a context of relative political stability and economic prosper- ity in the West at a time when humanist ideals of progress and faith in a unified European future seemed more possible that ever” (2018, 167). These directors took it for granted that Eumenides was rooted in democratic ideals and that their own productions would reaffirm those ideals. And similarly, the place and function of the Oresteia in the cultural canon was secure in England, CHAPTER 36 Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine Hallie Rebecca Marshall c36.indd 491 c36.indd 491 19-03-2022 16:30:08 19-03-2022 16:30:08