Jane Montgomery Griffiths’ An ox stand on my tongue grippingly reframes the tales of the sisters Helen and Clytemnestra. Think of it as Greek myth delivered with a Real Housewives twist.

Jessica Bentley and Angela Nica Sullen. Photo © Stephen Wilson-Barker

In myth, Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon and ultimately his killer. Helen? She comes to us with a lot more baggage as (among other epithets) “the face the launched a thousand ships/and burnt the topless towers of Ilium”.

The script (its title borrowed from a line in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) brings the sisters together in the same theatrical space to muse over their histories, their traumas and their accomodations to existence in a gilded cage – existences that are privileged in some senses (Helen loves to click-clack along the marble halls in her high heels) but marked by rape, infanticide, murder and the unpredictable whims of violently wrathful men.

Heightened, playful, roiling and accessible, Griffiths’ language straddles eons. Helen and Clytemnestra’s predicaments resound powerfully to our modern ears.

Stylishly mounted in Belvoir’s Downstairs Theatre, director Abbie-Lee Lewis’s production (it’s first, remarkably, save for a reading some years ago) begins with an unwrapping...