“A blackened ship of horror sailing through a sea of blood.” “Clytemnestra waits for Agamemnon like a spider in her sticky web of threads.” The world that I envisioned as a result of Erik’s words was one of fearsome demigods fighting and killing each other. From that first talk, I felt that this drama should not take place in a serene white world, but in the red and the black of the deepest passions. Agamemnon, besmirched with the blood of his massacres, would in his turn fall under Clytemnestra’s blood-stained hands when he came back home and clambered up to the palace. But how?

On a stairway, of course. Every Greek tragedy has stairs! But this was not going to be an ordinary stairway. Certainly not a stately Greek one, but rather something like a rope ladder that you climb on in a cave. I suddenly knew what to do with the space. If I could make the playing area just as steep as the sharply inclined seats for the audience, I could create a space many times larger than our five-foot deep stage floor!