Full cast announced for Globe's Oresteia

Shakespeare's Globe has announced full casting for Rory Mullarkey's new adaptation of The Oresteia, which opens next month.

Directed by Adele Thomas, the role of Clytemnestra will be played by former WhatsOnStage Award winner Katy Stephens, who appeared at the Globe last year in Julius Caesar and Howard Brenton's Doctor Scroggy's War.

She'll be joined by George Irving, who played the title role in Julius Ceasar, as Agamemnon and Apollo, and Serbian actress Branka Katić (Big Love) as Athena.

Joel MacCormack (Measure for Measure) plays Orestes, Rosie Hilal (The Hard Problem) plays his sister Electra and Naana Agyei-Ampadu Made in Dagenham) plays Cassandra.

The cast is completed by: Trevor Fox (Aegisthus), Dennis Herdman, James Lailey, Petra Massey, Dean Nolan, Brendan O'Hea, Paul Rider and Dickon Tyrrell.

First performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BC, Aeschylus's trilogy dramatises the shift away from the private blood vendetta and towards a public polis founded on principles of open trial and punishment.

Mullarkey said: "The Oresteia is a huge, epic trilogy about how we live together, so it's brilliant to be doing it in a huge, epic theatre right in the heart of a European capital city."

The Oresteia runs at Shakespeare's Globe from 29 August to 16 October 2015