The Oresteia shouldn’t be performed. Or at least, not in full. Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides are a tricksy group of plays by Aeschylus to melt and weld into a single thing; each tragedy on its own feels insufficient, but together the sense of individual character and motive could be swamped. Yet here it is in a single play, performed on the ADC stage.

So what’s the story? It’s an Ancient Greek domestic drama, set in the house of Atreus. In order to meet the gods’ favour for his campaign at Troy, Agamemnon has sacrificed his beloved daughter Iphigenia. His wife, Clytemnestra, is left at home, distraught and plotting. Agamemnon returns victorious from war with enslaved Cassandra, his new concubine. Clytemnestra takes revenge for her husband’s betrayal, and sets in motion a generational struggle of revenge and a search for justice. How does a main show grapple with the stark tragedy of Aeschylus’s bloody masterpiece?

The production feels fated from the very off: the set is a constant inconvenience to the actors. A set should provide an architecture for acting: this set hindered the performance at nearly every instance. It took the form of two raised platforms one on top of each other, painted white. Imagine a very wide, two tiered wedding cake. Nearly all of the action happened on its top plinth, with nearly none of the principal characters using the space several metres down stage. The result was that for the front four rows of the audience, nearly 40 people in total, our direct eye-line was a white plank. All action is limited to the top platform. It is painful to watch the physical intuitions of the actors being confined to such a small space. Constrained and awkward, the actors creep around their diminished stage, desperately trying to avoid the creaking boards below them. At times I wanted to see the actors fling themselves right across the stage, to lunge, to jump, to pounce. In this Oresteia, an actor never ran onto the stage. The decision to have all actors positioned at the marginalia of stage throughout the duration sapped energy: it is very difficult to produce a snappy performance if you’ve been stooping onstage for half an hour.

“The moments of jagged reality are very excellent”

This claustrophobic idea might have worked. The cycle is achingly domestic: hatred compounds hatred within “an ancient coil of mingled mystery”. Myles O’Gorman’s production alluded to this in its use of props: the old bath in which Agamemnon is murdered performs as a corrupted symbol for homely comforts. The rusty tub is something which feels real: I found myself craving these things. The moments of jagged reality are very excellent: Cassandra’s death is magnificent, as a spurt of blood splatters across Clytemnestra’s face. Maybe these moments become so important because everything else is so stark. Nevertheless, you wish there were more of them.

“The dearth of movement has an impact on delivery”

As a result of the monochrome palette, lighting is given a more pronounced role in creating mood. Johnny King, an ADC regular, casts seductive blues, red and greens on the stage, though one questions why the blinding house lights need to come up for a regular scene change quite so regularly. As such, this performance can make points which could be subtle, laboured. An alarm sound effect is played in a murder scene, extremely loud house music is played at other times to suggest tension. And yet, not enough attention is given to some key plot points. Orestes, Agamemnon’s exiled son, at one point inhabits what he calls “a full disguise”. While in this disguise, he manages to fool his own mother he is a traveller. Not a thing about his appearance was altered by the costume designer. Why not indulge in an outlandish dissembling for the fun of it? Maybe this choice was part of the stylised interpretation, but the Marlowe Society’s Oresteia often felt either too strident or lacking somewhere.

Because the actors are nervous to physically express themselves, they speak out to the audience regularly. Soliloquy can work effectively, but has to be used sparingly. Otherwise, the audience feels lectured, hectored into accepting a story told, not shown. This is particularly evident in Cassandra’s lengthy speech, where the set prevents her from moving dynamically across the stage. The dearth of movement has an impact on delivery. You might expect the Chorus line “joy overwhelms me” to be accompanied with some physical indication, but we are left with just matter-of-fact delivery of reported emotion. The portrayal of the Chorus left me quite confused: Maya Yousif is a very accomplished actor, and she enters as a naturalistic burst of energy. She is a gossipy friend, baffled at the plot’s crazed players. But she has been given too much to do by her director. Surely the point of the Chorus is that they argue with each other, surely the point is that they point towards the polis, the Athenian idealised democracy? In this production all that rich diversity is cut into one individual, which leads to a contradictory thing, especially in the final scene. Elsewhere, Amelia Hills is striking and exciting as the Herald. She rushes at times, but delivers with passion: often in this production words are lost behind the set, which involves intermittently descending plastic screens.

I’ve always imagined Electra’s scenes to be played at the foot of a great regal mausoleum, where she mourns her father Agamemnon’s murder. Annabelle Haworth didn’t have such a monument to interact with, and still gave an affecting and intelligent rendition. While Electra’s speeches were touching, this production comes alive at its most ridiculous moments: Athena, played by Francesca Bertoletti, emerges from the trap door to preside over the court in a sharp white suit. It’s a moment of pure theatre, and you feel like O’Gorman is at his daring best. Bertoletti plays her Athena for laughs, looking like something between Lorde and Davina McCall. Some moments in this Oresteia are pure wild, weird, student theatre, theatre without the threat of paying wages or professional overheads. Why not have disco lights for a murder scene, why not have Apollo on an iPhone? While this production isn’t perfect, at critical moments its experimental impulses can’t fail to delight.

The Oresteia is on at the ADC Theatre at 7.45pm, 30 January-3 February