Clytemnestra's story is taken from Greek legend, which shows human nature in its most vivid and uncensored condition. Clytemnestra featured in the plays of Aeschylus, whose work from the fifth century BCE shows Western theatre at its origin. Greek tragedy features themes such as adultery, power and revenge which continue to influence contemporary drama, even soap opera.

The story of Clytemnestra shows human behaviour pushed to its extreme by war and hunger. The play is set in the not-too-distant future: oil has run out and wars are being waged for food. Agamemnon, head of his tribe, has been away securing new trade routes. As part of forming a new alliance, he gave his daughter, Iphigenia, in marriage to an eastern tribe. They raped and killed her, and he has sent her ashes back home to Clytemnestra, his wife and Electra, their other daughter. Agamemnon's campaign ends with the fall of Troy. The Furies, ancient gods of revenge, try to take over the action and answer blood with blood. How far will Clytemnestra go for justice?

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre, rumoured to be the largest poem in the world. It's located near the rift in the space-time continuum, as shown on Dr Who and Torchwood.

Gwyneth has published eight books of poetry in Welsh and English, with a ninth forthcoming in October. Chaotic Angels (2005) brings together poems from her first three English collections.

Parables & Faxes (1995), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward.

Her second collection, Zero Gravity (1998), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry (the same year as Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, no chance!).

Sparrow Tree (2011) won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award.

The BBC made a documentary of Zero Gravity, inspired by her astronaut cousin's voyage to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 2010 she was given a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award recognizing a body of work and achievement of distinction.

Gwyneth's first non-fiction book Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (2002), was short listed for the Mind Book of the Year.

Her adaptation of the play for BBC Radio 4 won a Mental Health in the Media award.

Her second, Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005) recounts a voyage made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa.

Her first television screenplay, Y Streic a Fi ('The Strike and Me'), commissioned by S4C, won the 2015 BAFTA Wales for Best Drama.

Gwyneth is a librettist and dramatist and has written two chamber operas for children and an oratorio, all commissioned and performed by Welsh National Opera. Clytemnestra was commissioned, performed and published by the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.

Stardust: A Love Story, which explains the basic principles of particle physics, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University and in 2013 was commissioned to write poems by CERN.

Gwyneth was a Harkness Fellow 1982-85 and studied at Harvard University and the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University in the City of New York.

2008-09 she was the Mildred Londa Wiseman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and in 2009-10 Joint Sica/Stanford Humanities Center Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University.

In 2014 she was Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer of Poetry and English at Princeton University.

For the last three years she has been Faculty at Bread Loaf School of English, Vermont, USA and was the 2016 Robert Frost Chair of Literature.

In 2019 Gwyneth was elected Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.