This year’s Sydney Festival sees a revival of Thyestes, a surprise hit that played at the Malthouse in Melbourne in 2010. This Greek myth, which was dramatised by Seneca in the 1st century AD, is a particularly grisly one, and some audiences have found the experience quite challenging.

This production is a collaboration between members of The Hayloft Project. Actor Mark Winter was involved in the process right back in its earliest days of development, and has been in Sydney since the start of the year, rehearsing a show that he hasn’t performed in for fourteen months.

“Because we don’t have too long to get it back up and running, I’m sort of living a little bit like a monk at the moment, just going to rehearsals and sleeping and that’s it,” he says. “But it’s feeling good, like an old friend that you haven’t seen in a while; you know that you know each other, but it takes some time to get reacquainted.”

The Melbourne production grew out of the Malthouse Tower season. Director Simon Stone had wanted to do Thyestes for some time. So he, Winter and performer Thomas Henning moved into an office in Fitzroy and began hammering it out until they’d devised a structure that they were all happy with.

“We just shut ourselves away in an office just off Brunswick Street and we just literally talked for about a month, just work-shopping ideas and ways that we could tackle this. I guess our primary focus was, ‘what if this wasn’t a history piece?’ The original play is great but how do we make this mean something to a contemporary audience, and not be a thing that just harks back to the past?”

Once they had their bearings, they moved into the Malthouse and were joined by performer Chris Ryan, to began the process of writing. This involved the three performers creating a draft, then giving it to Stone – who produced a rewrite – then gave it back to them to improvise around. Winter feels that this method has bestowed some unexpected benefits.

“It was very productive way of getting there, because it meant that the strength of each member of the company really gets utilised. It doesn’t become one dominant voice, it’s four people’s best assets and all of those things are intertwined into the script.”

Thyestes made waves in Melbourne, generating a great deal of interest from audiences there. It sold out, and the season was extended. Winter doesn’t necessarily feel that it is altogether a good thing when you’re trying to revive an old show in a new city.

“I think that a bit of hype is good because hopefully people come to see it but at the same time, suddenly we’re dealing with a sense of expectation or anticipation which we didn’t have in Melbourne.

“So that’s a bit of a challenge, to reconnect with the story and why we’re doing it, and not have any sense of it being good; we want to get the show feeling natural so Sydney can really enjoy it and we can enjoy it the way the way that Melbourne seemed to.”

But that positive response would indicate that they have succeeded in making an ancient Greek myth relevant to present day audiences. Modern language and contemporary cultural references are just the start. Hayloft have completely reworked and rewritten the play to reflect a twenty-first century psychology, while still maintaining the integrity of the original.

The play is staged in the traverse, so each half of the audience can see the other; a mechanism that mimics the effect of the Greek chorus which leads spectators’ emotional responses. And while Thyestes comes with a particularly sordid and gory reputation, it’s structured in the manner of classical tragedy, with the most shocking events occurring offstage.

“There are some really confrontational and difficult aspects to this play which I guess some people find hard to deal with. Having said that, there’s a lot of humour too, and a lot of tenderness in the show as well.”

Winter explains that Hayloft never set out to make something controversial, just to interpret the story for modern audiences to the best of their ability. He feels that if the play is indeed resonating, then they have done their job, and in some way done a service to Seneca.

“This is a serious piece of work and we’ve worked really hard to make it. But I also hope too that people have a good time and I think it is exciting and quite joyous in many ways. I want people to come along and go ‘wow, that was a great night out, that was an amazing ride that we went on.'”

Thyestes is running from 15 January to 19 February at Carriageworks, Everleigh, NSW. Tickets from Ticketmaster. For more info visit sydneyfestival.org.au/2012/Theatre/Thyestes/