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.

Theatre review: The Rover, or, The Banish'd Cavaliers

Best-remembered today as England's first female professional writer (although it turns out in the 19th Century her name was a euphemism for a reet dorty hoor, society having decided that "female professional writer" wasn't actually something they were ready for yet, thanks,) Aphra Behn's most famous play is The Rover, or, The Banish'd Cavaliers. The subtitle sets the action a couple of decades before the play's writing, during the exile of the prince who would eventually be Restored as Charles II. His followers, equally unwelcome in England during Cromwell's rule, had a mixed reputation, seen by some as accomplished soldiers, by others as thrill-seekers lacking morals. Behn gives us just such a mixed picture - veering towards the latter - in her quartet of Cavaliers who end up in an unnamed Spanish town during Carnival season, and intend to make the most of its spirit.