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This is a review of the play, not this translation. I read Paul Roche's translation, which (as usual) was clear but not smashingly elegant.

Bleak is the road...I am coming.

Alcestis, the earliest of his extant plays, shows Euripides doing what he does best: overturning the rocks of myth and poking at the worms underneath. The story: Admetus has been promised by his buddy Apollo that he can escape death if, when his time comes, he can convince someone else to die in his place. Sadly, no one wants to do this for Admetus except his loving wife, Alcestis, who faithfully dies for him. And if that sounds like "WTF dude" to you, well, folks did things differently back then - but actually it sounds pretty fucked up to Euripides too, so here we go.

The juicy part of the play comes when Admetus's dad Pheres shows up. Admetus is on his way to bury Alcestis, and he's understandably a bit raw, and he starts raging at his dad, who is after all super old and why couldn't he have died? And his dad is like

"I'm the coward, you say, you - you prince of cowards
Shown up by a woman who died for you!
...Keep your mouth shut, coward, and remember
If you love your life, so does everybody."

Lol, pwned. Once again, Euripides the trickster breaks the cocks off the Greek statues.

The play is confused by the intervention of Heracles, who (view spoiler)[kinda bails everyone out and gives us a sudden happy ending. Fuckin' Heracles, right? It's often, as my boy Ronald points out, difficult to classify Euripides' plays, and that holds true here. It mixes comic and tragic tones and leaves you unsure what you've got. (hide spoiler)] But this is one of my favorites.

Update: with time, the deus ex Heracles has kinda gotten to me; I'm downgrading this to four stars because of the ending.