Electra/Persona

by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 21 August 2026

Benedict Andrews has had the interesting idea of presenting a stripped down version of Sophocles's Electra (in which an impassioned daughter seeks vengeance for her father's murder by her mother) followed by a stage version of Ingmar Bergman's celebrated 1966 film Persona (in which an actress playing Electra has fled a performance of the play, has refused to speak, and is being cared for by a loquacious nurse). He directs Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss who alternate the parts of Electra and Clytemnestra in the first half and the silent actress Elisabeth and the nurse Alma in the second half, with Ella Lily Hyland as Chrysothemis (Electra's sister) then Anna (the doctor treating Elisabeth), and Patrick Robinson as Aegisthus (Clytemnestra's lover) then Elisabeth's husband.

At the beginning the four actors enter in front of the front row of the audience and the two leads ask a member of the audience to toss a coin, with the rules that apply for determining first service in a tennis match; on this occasion Nina Hoss lost the call so Cate Blanchett could choose the roles and she chose to play Clytemnestra and Alma. Whether this ploy is in some way "fixed" so that a reasonable alteration of role playing can take place is an uncertain point; it will apparently not be possible consult the box office in order to arrange to see two performances with a guarantee that the roles will be reversed.

On a strikingly bare set designed by Magda Willi, consisting of a steep series of white stone steps covering the full width of the Lyttleton stage and leading apparently nowhere, and with a stainless steel hammer centrally placed and spotlit, the play Electra begins with Electra crawling up towards the hammer groaning in grief and anger, her desperate desire to avenge her father's murder unassuaged for years due to the absence of her brother Orestes. Her sister's appeals to reason appal and disgust her. When Clytemnestra appears the dreadful tangle of familial love, anger, hatred and resentment threatens to boil over: both women are implacable in their self-righteous justifications. 

In the absence of an actor taking the part of Orestes, the recognition scene between brother and sister is dispensed with, and Electra in some sense becomes Orestes, or assumes his character, in order to despatch Aegisthus when he arrives thinking to hear news of Orestes's death: unlike the formal arrangements of a Greek tragedy, the murder takes place on stage (and in a further departure from Sophocles, his death occurs before that of Clytemnestra). When "Orestes" confronts Clytemnestra (a scene drawn more from Aeschylus's version of the story) we might expect further butchery - but it is at this point that Electra inexplicably flees the stage through the auditorium; a curtain descends as if to deal with an unforeseen emergency and we are at the interval.

In Persona, the actress Elisabeth has been silent for some time, and her doctor assigns the nurse Alma to look after her; eventually they go to live in a seaside cottage, an arrangement which the doctor hopes will be restorative. But Elisabeth remains silent, while Alma talks and talks and talks. Elisabeth's features are projected from a hand-held video camera onto a large screen so that we can see that her perpetual silence is given subtle nuances by the smallest fleeting expressions on her face: it is a masterful piece of acting and a surprisingly resilient foil to the nurse's prolonged and at times desperate chatter as Alma deploys increasingly frantic methods to get Elisabeth to talk: only a direct physical threat leads to a distressed cry of alarm.

Is this juxtaposition a success? There are complex factors at work. We see actors choosing their parts in front of us, but then their performances are so intense and convincing that we perhaps "forget", in the usual way of audiences, that we are watching people who are acting, and we immerse ourselves in the presented dilemmas of the characters they are portraying. Then the performance inexplicably stops, and we never go back to it: we do not see the second murder nor do we have any idea of the consequences of this particular matricide (an issue not addressed in any surviving play by Sophocles, though it is the subject of surviving plays by Aeschylus and Euripides). Instead we see an intense and increasingly unhealthy relationship between a patient and her nurse, a reminder at one level that we are concerned with the trauma of an actress who was playing Electra when she fled the stage. But now we are watching an actress playing a traumatised actress, and another actress playing an increasingly vulnerable nurse.

Although the ostensible link between the two parts is that the actress we saw playing Electra did indeed leave the stage precipitously, and throughout the Persona section is almost entirely silent, there is perhaps a subliminal connection relating to the issue of trauma. For the Greeks, the Electra story was one episode in a blood feud within the Mycenaean royal family which lasted for generations, and clearly the character of Orestes suffers what we would call trauma in killing his mother, depicted in the form of the Furies pursuing him - and it is noteworthy that he is totally trapped since his father's murder cries out for vengeance, but so too does his mother's murder. Clearly there are traumas in Persona - Elisabeth's silence is a traumatic response, and Alma too has deeply repressed feelings, some of which are articulated in her long monologues. The questions of childbearing and maternal affection are raised both by Clytemnestra in Electra (famously she dreams of having given birth to a serpent when bearing Orestes) and by Alma in Persona (as she attempts to imagine Elisabeth's reasons for tearing her child's photograph in two) and these parts are taken by the same actress.

It's an intense experience: Greek tragedy is by its nature intense, and so too are most of Bergman's films, this one not the least. The two parts, though derived from theatrical and filmic works from centuries apart, do nevertheless make for a compelling if strange unity. Some of the power undoubtedly comes from the format which forces us to recognise that acting is taking place - and superb acting at that. Deep human emotions are being explored, but the theatricality of the process is being highlighted at the same time instead of being taken for granted, which is unusual but stimulating.