The week in theatre: Oedipus; Elektra review
These illuminations are not realised in this past week's productions. Still, there are glints. The most radical stroke in the new staging of Oedipus by Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus is the most exhilarating. The wordless chorus is made up of dancers, choreographed by Shechter. They stamp and spring: advancing in a line as if performing a haka; huddled together, swaying, reaching upwards and outwards so that they look like an unclenching fist. They do not outline the plot, nor are they characters, but they are more than simply mood music. They act upon the drama – and where more needed than in Oedipus? – like a bubbling unconscious. They move to Shechter's score, which has at its centre an insistent drum like a heart taking revenge. A rhythm like a train gathering speed runs through the evening.
Seven years ago in The Writer, Ella Hickson proved herself a dramatist who can shrewdly and subtly unpick certainty. Her version of Oedipus has vivid flashes, sometimes with a Stoppardian turn: 'People are always dying. It is their defining feature.' She gives the plot a plausible climate crisis background – those dancers stamp first through dust and then rain – and grants Oedipus's wife-mother, Jocasta, a particular scepticism and strength. Indira Varma is both stately and intimate. She subdues Hickson's excessive casualness, giving idioms – 'not everything is up for grabs' – an ironic roll. She blends with the sculptural quality of Rae Smith's design: a translucent white platform, the steady eye of a setting sun, long depths glimpsed at the back of the stage; majesty made uncertain by Tom Visser's lighting, with its melting blues and violets.
Varma's is the performance of the evening. She is not matched by American actor Rami Malek – he of Bohemian Rhapsody and more ominously Mr Robot. It might be that his rigid face is an imitation of a Greek mask. Perhaps his awkward, angular movements are an attempt not only to suggest Oedipus's bad foot, but to externalise his anguish. It is hard, though, to find any reason for his weird phrasing, with words arbitrarily emphasised and long pauses in the middle of lines leaving verbs and their subjects vainly waving at each other. This is the latest bit of star casting not to work.
The Canadian poet Anne Carson, translator of Elektra at the Duke of York's, has described the play's heroine as a 'vessel of eccentric sound', a woman whose voice, 'a thesaurus of screams', is her sole weapon as she seeks revenge for the death of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Marvel superheroine Brie Larson is the main reason for seeing Daniel Fish's all-over-the-place production. Shaven-headed, in a Bikini Kill T-shirt, she snarls into a handheld mic, slides in and out of song, lashes the stage with her anger. She is a cross between Hamlet and the unlistened-to prophet Cassandra.
The other jewel is Carson's translation itself: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action. For Elektra, her mother is 'a punishment cage wrapped round my life'; the death of a character is 'just a crack where the light slipped through'.
Nevertheless, the words are glimmers in a murky evening. This is a sprint of 75 minutes but it trudges. Fish directed a revelatory Oklahoma!, stripping away traditional swagger to create one of the best shows of 2022, but here he does not so much strip back as flay the drama into separate pieces: some are striking, but none of them feed each other. Ted Hearne's impressive music is sung by a silvery-voiced chorus, but the staging is sluggish: seated on a revolve (yes, yes, revenge is a cycle), the women in backless satin gowns might be decorative models on a wedding cake. As Orestes, Patrick Vaill bursts in dressed as a rally driver, capably delivering a gabbled commentary. Stockard Channing (in furs) is a sceptical but stolid Clytemnestra. Jeremy Herbert's design is baffling: a white wall behind the revolve that rises and sinks unpredictably; mics, lighting equipment, and an uncommented-on barrage balloon dangling in one corner. At times, it looks like a rehearsal room. If only this were just a rehearsal.
Star ratings (out of five)
Oedipus ★★★Elektra ★★
Oedipus is at the Old Vic, London, until 29 March
Elektra is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, until 12 April
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The Guardian
14-05-2025
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Only the decision to lend Oedipus some of their choreography strikes an odd note that weakens the mysterious, secretive quality of his transformative death. Carsen balances the contrasting paces of a play which, with the scheme hatched by Creon (a suavely malevolent Paolo Mazzarelli), momentarily grips like a thriller amid the heavily reflective pronouncements. 'Time sees everything,' runs one. As if to remind us, designer Radu Boruzescu's tall trees, planted on a stage of tiered rows akin to the hillside audience's, observe it all throughout. The resilient forest of Colonus is a stark contrast to Gianni Carluccio's set design for Electra, the second tragedy in the season at Syracuse. Carluccio's stage is sloped rather than stepped; much of the drama plays out on a tilted floor that resembles a building's collapsed exterior. The fall of the house of Atreus. The dust-covered piano and busted bedstead give a sense that Electra still resides in a world before the brutal replacement of Agamemnon with Aegisthus at Clytemnestra's side. The windows, at this angle, become open graves; a plaintive string composition reverberates from within alongside the looped sound of broken glass. The scorched slabs at the back of the set begin to resemble fragments, too, of papyri. Under Roberto Andò's direction, this piercing new translation by Giorgio Ieranò sharpens Electra's affinity with the natural world. Her opening speech ('O pure sunlight') is given at the piano. In the title role, Sonia Bergamasco is as indelible as Sartori's Oedipus – her pain similarly twisting through her gestures (one knee is bandaged and she moves like a wounded animal) while her mind logically processes her father's actions. Dressed in ragged grey, she seems to merge with the floor when she lies still but is otherwise a frenzy of rebellion. A similar heat rises from a hair-flicking, often hissing female chorus in shift dresses. The sight of the urn supposedly containing Orestes' ashes is felt in the gut: she crumples from within, tenderly caressing the object as if it was his body. It's frequently asked why Orestes extends Electra's pain, fussily stage-managing his return, but Roberto Latini gives us a brother who after coolly planning the events is stunned by their reunion, almost unable to fathom it himself, fearful of her reaction. The moment is richly complex. Unlike Brie Larson in the recent London production, Bergamasco succeeds throughout in entwining the anger with grief. She is a sardonic match, too, for Clytemnestra (Anna Bonaiuto) who detonates the lines: 'Being a mother is a frightful thing. For as much as they hate you, there is no way to hate your own children.' This Electra is as physically disgusted as Hamlet is by the mother's 'enseamèd bed'. A sense of contest is inseparable from Sophocles' work, which was regularly entered in Athenian competitions, and one of the play's toughest scenes to conquer is Paedagogus's action-packed fabrication detailing Orestes's death in a chariot race. Danilo Nigrelli steers the speech superbly, only the wind to be heard during each pause, its transfixing effect heightened by a chorus who inch closer towards the teller. You almost believe the lie yourself and reach the edge of your seat as Electra's stasis is succeeded by a swift and ruthless revenge. The Greek theatre's summer programme runs until 6 July in Syracuse, Italy. Chris Wiegand's trip was provided by the National Institute of Ancient Drama.
