Theatre review: Electra/Persona

The latest production to employ the staging conceit of the lead actors alternating roles is Benedict Andrews' Electra Forward Slash Persona, a show that already has a pretty high concept as its starting point: Andrews' play is a mashup of Sophocles' Electra with Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, about the relationship between an actress who's suddenly turned mute and the nurse assigned to look after her. So the play opens with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss asking an audience member in the front row to toss a coin (or in tonight's case, fling it to the ground in a wild panic.) Given the winner gets to choose which part she wants to play this would be a very easy way to rig the system and have the actors pre-agree who was going to do what*, but regardless of how much it's actually down to chance, tonight saw Blanchett opt to play Clytemnestra in the Greek Tragedy half of the evening.

Clytemnestra is the queen who murdered her husband as soon as he returned from his ten-year war in Troy, so Hoss plays her daughter Electra, who wants revenge for her father's death. But her mother's act didn't come out of nowhere, and Clytemnestra has her own argument for why Agamemnon deserved to die.

Even as a straightforward adaptation of Sophocles' play I liked what Andrews is doing here, certainly a lot more than the last ham-fisted attempt to do a starry auteur version of the story. There's genuine emotion as well as an unusual amount of humour in the way Blanchett's Clytemnestra gets Hoss' Electra and Ella Lily Hyland's Chrysothemis to act out the original sins that underpin the Tragedy. It's a version that's more sympathetic than most to the queen's fairly understandable motive for wanting to kill her husband, although Blanchett still gets to show some of the negative way Sophocles portrays her, very imperious for someone who can't spell Kate. Or Blanket.

I thought this was going to be dipping in and out of the two source texts but it's pretty much a game of two halves, and after a final interesting spin on the original story that's essentially a mirror image of the central twist in Robert Icke's Oresteia, Electra kills Aegisthus (Patrick Robinson) but freezes when it comes to her mother. Hoss is now Elisabeth, an actress who stopped mid-performance and turns selectively mute.

Her doctor sends her off to stay in a remote country home with nurse Alma (Blanchett) who, faced with a wall of silence starts to unload her own confessional thoughts on her patient; eventually her own sanity starts to feel the strain. The change in story comes with a change in style too, and I have to say I preferred the first half's use of Magda Willi's vast staircase, with its mix of classical and modern tropes - the cast paint their faces in a nod to ancient Greek masks, but also tip bags of clothes onto the stage to use in their storytelling. Persona's heavy reliance on live monochrome projections of the action has become too common a technique in the last decade, but the extreme close-ups on Hoss' silent, expressive face are very effective.

For a long while it remains unclear why these two stories in particular have been spliced together, but it does mean that when the penny finally drops on the connection to this specific version of Electra, as well as the alternating casting, it makes for a satisfying reveal. I approached this as one of those shows that really could go either way and while there were parts of it that didn't work for me - I don't know what the extended repeated section at the end was meant to achive - I largely found it a satisfying tying together of initially unrelated-seeming narratives.

Electra/Persona by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman is booking until the 10th of October at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus.

*looking at the production photos it does look like the similar-but-not-identical costumes by Merle Hensel have a black T-shirt for Electra and an open-necked shirt for Clytemnestra, so the leads have already come onto the stage dressed for the roles they're going to play