Love shared

"In his lifetime, Euripides aroused great interest, and great opposition," the Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre tells us. The Companion continues: "He dealt less with broad questions of morality and religion than with personal emotions and passions - love, hate, revenge."

All of which has been taken on board by Helen Edmundson, who has adapted Euripdes's Orestes for the Shared Experience theatre company. When we met in Shared Experience's London office, I asked Helen what her reaction was on first being offered the job.

"To be honest, I'd never read Orestes," said Helen. "Obviously, I'd read some Greek drama - I was aware of the more famous plays, but not Orestes. So I had a good look at it, and went to see a university production, in Greek, at the Oxford Playhouse.

"The thing I found most exciting about it was that I found it so relevant to the present day - the fact that Orestes uses the gods as an excuse to justify violence: I think he probably genuinely believes that the gods told him to do this. One does get the feeling from the play in all sorts of ways that people are using religion to justify things.

"It's a play about a very idealistic young man. He feels he has a great deal to offer the world. But I think he is a little bit naive, and I've tried to contrast him with Electra - she's problematic, and damaged in lots of ways, but she's much more canny. Orestes ends up coming off the rails and, in a way, seeks death and glory. That is obviously relevant to today."

Shared Experience's Orestes is billed as being "by Helen Edmundson based on Euripides". That suggests that Helen was given a wide brief.

"I was! I said I wouldn't be interested in just doing a new translation, that's not what I do. The director, Nancy Meckler, understood that, so I have played fast and loose. I don't read Greek, so I began with four different translations, one of which was supposed to be very literal - the Greek and the English translation were on facing pages. Euripides is fantastic in that he throws all sorts of psychological possibilities around the characters, but then doesn't develop his ideas. For me, the ideas were very intriguing, they gave me food for thought.

"I think there is only one line in my play that is the same as the original. So I would definitely say that if you're coming to see the Euripides play, that's not what it is. Some students of Greek drama may well be horrified by what I've done.

"But I also didn't want to entirely remove all the conventions of Greek tragedy, because then the play could just go into freefall. For instance, I didn't want to use ordinary and colloquial English. So I set up a very heightened type of language, it veers towards the poetic. It's quite rich, and quite rhythmical. I then had to sustain it all the way through, but I enjoyed having the chance to play with words."

The very name Shared Experience suggests a theatre company that encourages actors to contribute their own ideas, and then perhaps ask for bits of dialogue to be rewritten during rehearsals.

"It's interesting with Shared Experience," Helen told me. "At some point during the rehearsal process, they'll do a workshop, and that's the time when it feels like a free-for-all. That's when we want actors to try things out and share their intellectual ideas about the characters.

"After that, I finish the script, and that's it. Although, obviously, if something's not working, or a line is just clumsy, I'll make small changes."

Orestes is by no means the first adaptation that Helen Edmundson has carried out for Shared Experience. Previously she has tackled Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, War and Peace and Gone to Earth. She also writes original plays - her Coram Boy was first staged at the National Theatre last Christmas, and is to be revived there this year. What led her into the often financially perilous life of a playwright?

"I kind of snuck in by the back door. I studied drama at Manchester, and then I set up a theatre company. It was a sort of feminist, agitprop company - very much of its time.

"We started off just doing the odd gig, changing in the toilets. Eventually we got Arts Council funding, and an office. We became quite well set up and established. When I was working with that company, I wrote lots of songs - we used a lot of music and humour. So I did plenty of writing, as well as directing and performing. It was really wonderful, all-round experience. It taught me a lot.

"Finally, I decided it was time to move on, so I said: I would really like to have a go at writing something which would be more of a narrative play'. So I wrote the company a musical play, which had a narrative.

Tony Clark, who was running Contact Theatre in Manchester at the time, saw it, and thought it was very strong. So he then commissioned me to write a play, which was very exciting. So it just happened like that. I wasn't someone who had to write lots of plays on spec, send them out, and then knock on doors."

First nights in the theatre can be notoriously nerve-wracking for actors, directors and writers alike. How does Helen Edmundson react when the curtain first rises on a piece of her work?

"I find it very scary. It's a very tense time. I always sit in the middle of the audience, and I always try and go to the ladies' toilet in the interval - it's a very good place to hear what people are saying. Sometimes you don't hear what you want to hear! But Orestes is tricky because it doesn't have an interval, so it's almost impossible to gauge what effect it's having.

"Also, there are no laughs - normally I make sure that there are lots of points where people can laugh a bit. But in this one there's maybe one chuckle, making it even harder to know what the audience is thinking. But there's no point in hiding oneself away, is there?"

Orestes is at the Oxford Playhouse from Tuesday until Saturday, November 4. For tickets, call 01865 305305.