Radio Those whom the Gods seek to destroy, they first encourage to write a play in the Greek idiom. At least so it seems, for there are few who can retell Greek myth without resorting to either bombast or anachronism. But in her fine reworking of Sophocles's Women of Trachis, Timberlake Wertenbaker mostly avoids both.

When Heracles falls for a young woman, his wife Dianeira sends him a gold cloth which, unbeknownst to her, is poisoned and putrifies his flesh - as the cloth that Medea sent to Jason. In the mayhem, Dianeira takes her own life, and the dying Heracles forces his son to marry the mistress.

Wertenbaker's theme is rage perpetuated within families, across generations and societies. She examines how entrenched anger can become, with infants suckled on it, until it becomes our very identity.

The play's most novel aspect was its structure. Wertenbaker herself (co-director with Catherine Bailey) set the scene, with Olympia Dukakis playing the aged, blind Greek storyteller. Dukakis provided a modern gloss, a wry take on Greek conventions. Necessary, because those Greeks lived with such an unremitting, epic intensity that one longed for a touch of contemporary irony. Dukakis duly supplied it, even if she sounded disconcertingly like Alistair Cooke.

The acting was uniformly good, with Alan Howard magnificent as Heracles, all regal frailty. Wertenbaker's writing is always striking, and here there was ferocious power. But can Wertenbaker now turn back more directly to the present, and rest the classical? Contemporary conflicts could use her limpid eloquence.