Elektra! Brie Larson playing the eponymous principal character; Anne Carson’s famous translation echoing through the Duke of York’s Theatre; Annie-B Parson’s choreography gracing the stage: there is a certain lyricism inherent to Director Daniel Fish’s (or should we call it Carson’s?) version of Sophocles’ Electra – emphatically stylised with a Graecizing ‘k’ in the Greek heroine’s name, spray-painted over the Latinate ‘c’ version on the play’s promotional material – beyond what my childish collocation of these names gestures to. It’s greatly imaginative, pushing the nature of its staging and setting to their limits, and even if not wholly successful, Elektra should be praised for the commitment it makes to this experimentation.
As a classicist, and more aptly, someone who produced a version of Sophocles’ Electra as an undergraduate (The New College Greek Play in Oxford, 2023), I have a vested interest in, and particular fondness for, productions of the Sophoclean version, even over the Euripidean one. In fact, every time some form of this ‘Electra’ is on (before this, there was Strauss’ Elektra at the RBO), a fellow (former) classicist friend and I insist on getting the cheapest tickets available and attending. But this is a craving which cannot always be sated. The Guardian’s Michael Billington, recently mourning the comparative neglect Sophocles’ play has suffered, noted that the dearth of Electra productions is surprising, as it is a play that ‘combines formal perfection, profound passion, scrupulous fairness and sharp irony.’ Is Elektra the answer to our prayers, then?
Well, not quite. Let’s start with the good parts. Larson is fantastic as Electra: she’s moody, scowling, slouched over. She’s got a buzz cut, a ripped T-shirt, stomping Docs, and with a microphone in tow; I wouldn’t think twice if you told me she was about to perform a spoken word poem at the university open mic. In short, she’s insufferable. Some might call out Electra’s monotony, and do (‘a real lack of acting’ I recall one Reddit post saying), but I think it’s an ingenious mode to have Larson conduct herself the way she does. Every time I’ve read and re-read the play, Electra as a character has never failed to seem to me deeply self-righteous, and worryingly obsessed with her father, Agamemnon.
As Wheeler (2003) puts it in Classical Quarterly, Electra monopolises the vocabulary of piety (δίκη) throughout the play, but cannot escape the clawing accusations of transgression (τὸ αἰσχρόν). She becomes a wind-up doll, barking out the virtues of her motherly hatred and the justification for the murderous plans she concocts. Does Larson need to sing every ‘no’ the Carson translation provides her? No. Nor does she need to spit on the ground every time Aegisthus’ name is mentioned, nor trigger a drumming sound when saying ‘father’. But that’s perfectly fine. Nothing about Electra as a character, at the point at which we meet her in Sophocles, should feel very natural, and I think Larson balances an Electra who comes across both deeply forceful and forced in what she does.
In a clever update on (what can be) a cloying tragic messenger speech – in Sophocles’ Electra, this report comes from the paidagogos – Patrick Vaill’s Orestes, swapping out the imagery of chariots for that of race cars, dresses up in a Formula One suit and delivers the tale of his own death with the variety and canniness of a sports commentator. I also enjoyed the ‘mob wife’ look Clytemnestra (Stockard Channing) employed, even if her voice couldn’t carry the same gravitas. And finally, the (small) chorus, engulfing the spinning rotunda of the stage, commendably embody their descriptive and declamatory role in song, reaching the emotional heights Electra almost refuses to.
Onto the valiant, but unsuccessful. By giving Electra the microphone and no other character, there is implicit comment on who gets to speak most proudly in the play; it is natural that Chrysothemis, the sickeningly obedient sibling who wishes her sister would be more of a bystander, gets stomped down by her sister’s words. What is not so natural is a tech malfunction by which tunes from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, combined with Larson’s disdainful boom, render Marième Diouf’s resolute proclaims inaudible for a good chunk of their back and forth. Besides the revolving rotunda, there is not much by way of set design: an inexplicable hanging zeppelin, a white curtain lulling behind, sprayed by a gush of black paint which also blights Electra halfway through. Is it meant to represent in Electra a transference of guilt, an emptiness of spirit, a pivotal sense of resolve? Who’s to say.
Equally puzzling is a marked, but brief, colour switch from white to pink during the build-up to the recognition scene. ‘It seemed like things were about to get exciting from there,’ one of my friends hoped. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Even if I can defend the monotony of Electra as a learned choice, the lack of excitement present in the reconciliation scene between the two siblings is less forgivable. When watching the rehearsals for the Oxford production two years prior, I always noticed the charged, almost incestuous, tension present between Orestes and Electra; while that is certainly not a required lens, I wanted to (and yet could not) believe Larson and Vaill as the proclamations ‘oh love, you break on me like light! / Yes like light’ (1638-9) left their lips. And finally, the snippets of modern news audio (on torture, on iron-clad rods and unrecognisable (post-human) faces) which interspersed the verbal confirmations of Clytemnestra’s death by matricide were jarring, in a bad way.
If you’re interested in experimental theatre – or want to see Greek theatre in a transformational state (if nothing else, Carson’s breezy translation is in itself a nice reminder that updated tragedy can still retain moving features) – there is a lot to admire. If you’re keen to see a genuinely underperformed Sophoclean text in a set-up which gives it its complete dues as a captivating tale of a generationally tortured family, you won’t leave the theatre satisfied, but you will have some good food-for-thought on your journey home.
By Kiana Rezakhanlou
The Camera 