Elektra

by Sophokles, translated by Anne Carson

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 17 March 2025

Daniel Fish directs Brie Larson as Elektra, Stockard Channing as Clytemnestra, Patrick Vaill as Orestes, Greg Hicks as Aegisthus and Marième Diouf as Chrysothemis, with a chorus of six women, in a version of Sophokles's play adapted from Anne Carson's translation from 2001. (As a pedantic point, why the choice to use 'k' rather than 'c' for the more usual 'Sophocles' and 'Electra', but not for 'Clytemnestra'?)

The play presents a moral dilemma in the starkest terms: Elektra's father Agamemnon has been murdered by her mother Clytemnestra, and the aggrieved and grieving daughter feels that vengeance is the only possible response. She hopes for the return of her brother Orestes and that he will perform the requisite act of vengeance - yet how can it be right to murder one's mother?

Elektra herself has no doubts: she is consumed by rage against her mother and her situation as a virtual slave in her mother's household, overseen by the usurping paramour Aegisthus, her mother's lover and fellow murderer of Agamemnon, and himself a victim of the family feud (though this is not mentioned in Sophokles's version of the story). The chorus while alert to the moral sickness pervading the city, questions whether Elektra's unrelenting fury is wise. Her sister Chrysothemis appears more or less comfortable with accepting the current state of affairs. Both these attitudes earn Elektra's scorn, and only serve to wind her up to further paroxysms of anger. Clytemnestra's appearance only intensifies her rage.

All this is brilliantly conveyed in this production.  Elektra dominates, her anguish amplified by the use of a hand-held mike as she prowls around a slowly revolving stage sparsely littered with electronic paraphernalia. Every time the word "no" occurs she wails it in varying degrees of outrage. Every time she (or anyone else for that matter) mentions Aegisthus by name she spits derisively. By way of contrast, every time Orestes is named, there is a ritual thumping of the chest over the heart by the six members of the Chorus. In the meantime these women chant their supple lines of comment in close harmony; the perennial problem of how to manage a Greek chorus has here been triumphantly solved. The conversations (or confrontations) with Chrysothemis and Clytemnestra are impassioned but occasionally relieved by a bleak humour as Elektra makes knowing asides to the audience.

Daniel Fish has intensified the concentration on Elektra herself by dispensing with the opening scene of the play in which Orestes plans with his old tutor (the Paedagogus) the ruse by which news of his supposed death is brought to Argos; and indeed Orestes himself, rather than the old man, delivers the hectic account of the chariot race which is supposed to have killed him. Again, with the use of microphones, this account comes across like an excited radio commentary of a modern race meeting. Though it is a little confusing to have blended the two male characters, the force of this "revelation", hard on the heels of Clytemnestra's blasphemous prayer that her dream should only come true if it is advantageous to her, indicates that she is actually trapped, though she does not yet know it. When Orestes finally reappears as himself clouds of mist envelop the stage rendering the climactic murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as spectral occurrences.

The consequences of this act of vengeance are not examined; Agamemnon's own guilt in sacrificing his daughter at the outset of the Trojan war is adduced by Clytemnestra as a justification for her actions, but her daughter utterly rejects the argument, so the focus is totally on Elektra's own predicament. With its stark setting and intense concentration on Elektra herself, it is a powerful play embodied here in a powerful production.