Our history as a country of blood revenge means a reimagining of Greek drama may have much to teach us, writes Belinda McKeon.

There's much about Rina Yerushalmi, artistic director of the acclaimed Israeli theatre ensemble Itim, that comes as a surprise. There's her conviction, for example, that to bring her new production Mythos - a reimagining of the ancient Greek dramas of the House of Atreus, in particular Aeschylus's trilogy The Oresteia - to Irish audiences at Dublin Theatre Festival next month is to fulfil not an opportunity but a necessity. Like the Middle East and the Greece of Orestes and Electra, she says, "Ireland is a bloody country", mired in the ancient net of blood revenge, and it's to such places that she and her ensemble must tour.

Then there's Yerushalmi's decision to shatter the note of hope with which the original Oresteia closes, that joyful scene in which Orestes, the young man who has obeyed his sister Electra's command to murder their mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for her slaying of their father, Agamemnon, is acquitted of his crime. In her version a desolate, unforgiven Orestes walks into a future of eternal exile, while his sister dances in a frenzy of death, strangled by the bloodstained ties that have bound generations of her family.

And there's the startling bleakness of her vision in this production, her stark depiction of a humanity trapped in a cycle of bloodshed and hostility, doomed to atone for the deeds of the dead. Unusually for a piece of theatre that traces links between ancient tales and contemporary tragedy, Mythos does not look to the past for answers, for affirmation, for reason to hope.

But what's most surprising is Yerushalmi's constant good humour. As she sifts through the harsh truths of human nature that Mythos pushes coldly to the fore, her voice is freely, frequently lifted by laughter. Not a cruel laughter, not a cynical, world-weary laughter but a warm, open acquiescence, a bemused shrugging at how things have proven themselves to be.

And things have turned out badly. Mythos bears witness to terrible acts. A child is sacrificed, a city slaughtered; a father and a mother are murdered in quick succession; the young lives of a brother and sister are ruined by the compulsion to avenge. But Yerushalmi is uninterested in casting judgment. "Everyone is right in this play," she says. "From the point of view of the person who is doing it, it is right, because there was some unjustful action towards them, and they want to bring back that violence."

It's an attitude learned from long years of watching things turn out badly in her native place; Yerushalmi doesn't condone what happens in violent situations, be it on her stage or in the Gaza Strip. But just as her stage for Mythos is built from dense layers of wooden boards - variously mirrored and bloodied and fractured, serving as marriage beds, ritual sites, sacrificial altars - the reasons for terrible actions in places like Israel are complex and manifold. She is interested in the larger picture that informs the complexity - the composition of societies and traditions that burden their citizens with a sense of vengeful duty.

Living in Israel, hearing sounds that signal the deaths of soldiers, of suicide bombers, of stone-throwing children, she knows at first hand the destruction wrought by that sense of hereditary obligation at the heart of the Greek drama. And she does not simplify. "I'm sure that inside, morally, every one of those young men and women, who have to go into these areas and kill, they're confused," she says. "I think both sides feel there is no choice. Otherwise they don't go to kill or be killed. If you're there, and every second day some bomb is killing your children, I think you have to do something. It's not right or wrong, it's just do."

The belief behind Yerushalmi's vision in Mythos is that, as soon as there is action there are consequences. And as, in violent situations, the consequences - hatred, vengeance, death - are the same, the question of right and wrong becomes irrelevant. Although an action will always seem right to its protagonist, to someone else - or, as the Greeks had it, to some or other of the gods - it will inevitably cause offence. "So you can never be justful in your actions," she says. "As soon as you are absorbed in what you think is right, you are bound to do something wrong at the same time on the other side." And so Orestes must avenge his mother's death and pay for it with his life, and so wars begin. It works like clockwork.

Depressingly, Yerushalmi believes warfare may be a natural part of human existence, which is why, with Mythos, she scrapped the optimism of the Oresteia's final scene. "We cannot pretend that the Greek ending is our ending," she says. "It proposed a court at Athens, a city that had citizens at the court to make its justice. But we know now that there is no justice, so what's the point in repeating that ending? The last century has killed more than any other century before it - it never stops. So what," she laughs, "what optimistic note do you want to hear in the play?"

Discussions about peace are all very well, she believes, but they change nothing. "Sure, politics change - even in Israel they are talking to one another now - but life doesn't," she says. "I don't think that ever the world had a day without war somewhere. I was born in a war, and probably I will die and somewhere there will be some war. As long as human beings are the way they are, somebody will kill somebody for some reason. Try for one day when it stops, and if you get that one day I will be there, singing with you."

Instead, she and her ensemble are singing about death, about duty and about the destruction it wreaks on young lives. Yet by all accounts their song lifts the heart; critics have raved about the stirring effect of Avi Balili's original music, merged, at crucial points in the drama, with everything from traditional drones and melismas to Beethoven sonatas and modern ballads. And above the heads of the 14-strong cast another beautiful orchestra sounds its melodies: a projected image of the Milky Way, with its distant suns and its quickening meteors, with its infinite mystery that shrinks the drama of humanity to minuscule proportions, just as the power of the gods rendered insignificant the individual dilemmas of the ancient Greeks.

And it's from that music, ultimately, that something like a note of hope will make itself heard in Mythos. It's in the perspective provided by the music of the spheres, the reminder that no matter how desperately important a belief or an ideology may seem, in the larger scheme of things it really doesn't matter. And so, in Electra's final plea to the gods to have mercy, to pity all those who have died and will die, she is sounding Yerushalmi's plea, too: stop inflicting on the young the fatal obligation to kill.

Yerushalmi accepts that people will harm one another as long as there is some reason; what she doesn't accept is that such a reason to act has to exist. Memory, tradition, notions of the cause: all of these things survive down the ages as reasons to slaughter. Without them the world would be a better place; and, believes Yerushalmi, we can live without them.

"The condition for national unity is not collective memory, he says, but collective forgetting. When a nation builds its nationality on collective memory, such as the Palestinians want to do - the notion that Israel is the enemy, they kill us, we are a nation if we remember that. But if to perpetuate memory is a way to justify action, it's hopeless. If memory becomes your active ingredient in your decisions, then it's dangerous. It can't get you into a future. It narrows your landscape inside."

It would have been better for Orestes, then, had he refused to allow the history of the House of Atreus to determine his path through life, to rule the decisions he made. But ought he to have forgotten that house completely? Discarded the memory of his mother, of his father? And, by implication, should a troubled nation discard the memory of all that it has been through?

"What forgetting is, no nation will accept," says Yerushalmi. "Because that's what built the history, unfortunately: history comes from horrible events - the fire, the flood, the war. And you can't forget that, because then you don't know who you are. But you say, OK, I am that person, that happened to me, you put it in your library and you move on. It's part of your history, it's part of your book, it's not part of your day-to-day life now. But when you make the book your present-day life and act on that basis - which is what religious people do all the time, for example - that is where it is really devastating."

Mythos is a dark work, then, but at its core - at its darkest point, in fact - it offers a way out, the possibility of a different future. And perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the play, Yerushalmi concludes, is that it will bring people together to consider that possibility. "The hope is not in saying, oh, tomorrow will be a better day," she says. "The hope is that you came to see the play, we came to do the play and we both understand that action is not going to solve anything. Here is a very old play. And it's also about our time. And at the end all you have left is to be compassionate, to keep your heart open and remember where you could be, that you could be in the bloodshed. Look at this play, and listen to it through your age, and you'll see that we still have some work to do. But beyond that I cannot offer you a hopeful future."

And she's laughing again, raising her hands in bafflement, her face a question mark. She has no easy solutions; nor does her play. But in such honesty lies a strange consolation.

Mythos is at the Tivoli Theatre, October 9th-11th, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. For details, see www.dublintheatrefestival.com