IT WAS supposed to be the best day of our trip

IT WAS supposed to be the best day of our trip. My girlfriend and I woke up to a beautiful dawn overlooking the South China Sea. We’d spent the night in Miri, a provincial town in Sarawak, and were about to embark on a riverboat journey to Mulu National Park, one of the world’s last remaining unspoilt rainforests and wildlife reserves. As we arrived at the quay, our enthusiasm changed to apprehension as we viewed our transportation, which appeared to be an elongated coffin with a 1960’s jet engine stuck to the back.
As the boat got under way, we lurched forward, dodging semi-submerged tree trunks, at high speed. (For a pounds 30 a night supplement you can stay in a four-berth log cabin.) Activities on offer include sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, canoeing and white-water rafting.Scholars Restaurant, Stirling Highland Hotel, Stirling (tel: 01786 475444). An autumn- break package is available until 22 December, price pounds 105 per person for three nights’ dinner, bed and breakfast.

This stone-built house is 65 miles from Inverness and owners Aileen and Robery Burrows serve excellent home cooking in portion sizes that are good for hungry cyclists. Dinner, bed and breakfast costs pounds 45 per personCroft-na-Caber activity centre, overlooking Loch Tay at Kenmore, (tel: 01887 830236) offers b&b for between pounds 30 and pounds 35 per person. The standard fare is pounds 119, but the APEX fare, booked seven days in advance, costs pounds 99. Cycles can be taken on the sleeper at no extra cost.Cycling around the HighlandsFor detailed bi-directional maps of the route (map 7c for the Inverness to Glasgow section and map NN7B for Glasgow to Carlisle) write to Sustrans, PO BOX 21, Bristol BS99 2HA (tel: 0117-926 8893), or visit the website at http:// www.sustrans .uk. Maps cost pounds 5.99 each (plus pounds 1.50 p&p)orders.Where to stayOn the first night, the author stayed at the Osprey Hotel, Ruthven Road, Kingussie (tel: 01540 661510). On the return journey, the train leaves Inverness at 8.30pm, Blair Atholl at 10.30pm, Pitlochry at 10.42pm and Stirling at 12.04am. After the town of Callander we abandoned the Sustrans route from Glasgow to Carlisle, and followed the A84 to Stirling where we would be picking up the sleeper at midnight. We were in gentler, rolling landscape and as soon as Stirling Castle came into view perched high on a rock, we knew we were rolling for home.

After showering at the local swimming pool we had our final guilt-free blow-out dinner of Scottish salmon and Angus beef at the Scholars restaurant before before boarding the train. My head was full of indelible images of stunning Scottish scenery.On our way to Euston (we were an hour late at 9.20am), we passed through a few suburban towns, including Leighton Buzzard where the platform was packed with commuters with briefcases. Lying in our beds, sipping cups of tea, we were disappointed to be back in the city, but agreed it wasn’t a bad way to commute. Despite the embarrassment of a day at work in crumpled cycle gear, the trip had been so good there was even some wild talk about doing it again in the opposite direction.FACT FILEhighlands by bicycleTake the sleeperThe sleeper train from London Euston to Inverness runs from Sundays to Fridays departing Euston at 9.30pm and arriving in Inverness at 7.47am. A fallen and hewn oak tree provided an impromptu set of table and chairs. Clocking our highest speed of 42mph we cruised down to the junction at the Falls of Dochart in Killin where the river tumbles over the shelves of granite rock.Ten miles further on, we found the pubs in Kingshouse too near the busy road for comfort and opted for a picnic near Loch Lubnaig instead.

The choruses’ “unending laments” are heavily edited and occasionally brightened by unexpected physical comedy. Purcarete is happy to introduce anachronism: with their double-breasted grey suits and leather briefcases, the chorus of Old Men in Agamemnon look like pensioned- off apparatchiks. These touches soften but do not negate the unspeakable horror of watching a family destroyed by primal violence.That the essence of Aeschylus’s drama is neither swamped by Purcarete’s idiosyncratic vision, nor somehow mummified by Hall’s historicity, illustrates Purcarete’s belief that: “These texts are so rich you can tell the story in any way you choose.”Even if they continue to arrive only at intervals of 15 or more years, productions like these keep Greek drama alive at a time when, in Britain, academic interest in the civilisation from which they emerged is minute. More than one million enrolled at UK universities in the past four years – just 12 of them chose to read classical Greek as a single honours degree.Since 1991, Purcarete’s fixation on the classics has evolved through Craiovan productions of Ubu Rex with scenes from Macbeth, Phaedra, Les Danaides and Titus Andronicus, all of which have been performed in the UK to great acclaim.

Even if post-revolutionary Romania had a David Hare figure writing state-of-the-nation plays, the 48-year-old director would not be interested. “My taste is for classical literature because it is the most modern literature possible,” he explains from his office at the Centre Dramatique Nationale in Limoges, where he has been director for the past year. “The huge distance of history between our time and Aeschylus or Shakespeare gives the plays a perspective on essential acts of humanity that makes them wonderfully clear.”The grotesque tyrant and his wife in Ubu Rex resembled the Ceaucescus, and it was the parallel between “the birth of democracy” at the end of Eumenides and the contemporary political situation in Romania which led Purcarete to tackle The Oresteia. “I was drawn to what happens when people must abruptly deal with the problem of democracy – a situation that applies not just to Romania but to many other countries in Europe.”Where Hall’s Oresteia ran for four and a half hours, Purcarete’s lasts 160 minutes, and it is the Choephoroe, the tale of Orestes’ return, reunion with his sister, Electra, and vengeful murder of Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, which has borne the brunt of the cuts: a text that runs for 30 pages in my paperback edition has been cut to just 30 lines.We are accustomed to seeing Sophocles’s version of the same events in Electra, a play used to test the talents of our greatest actresses.