Elektra
One thing’s for sure: tonight’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor was a lot better than last night’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor.
Where the Old Vic’s Rami Malek-fronted Oedipus was over-conceptualised into oblivion, Daniel Fish’s take on Elektra – which opened one night later – is a curious mixture of chaotic randomness and underlying respect for the 2,500-year-old play.
Marvel star Brie Larson puts in a very solid turn as the eponymous princess. We meet Elektra living a twilight existence, locked in a permanent state of impotent rage at her mother Klytannestra (Stockard Channing, acid) and her lover Aegisthus (Greg Hicks, hapless). Famously, they killed her father Agamemnon. Now Elektra wants them dead. The trouble is she’s not actually willing to do it herself: she’s waiting for her brother Orestes to return home and get to murderin’. In the meantime, Larson’s Elektra stomps about in a Bikini Kill t-shirt with a shaven head, trading sardonic quips with her mother, her sister Chrysothemis (Marième Diouf), and an all-singing chorus of white-clad women. It’s a tricky role to play, combining murderous rage with total inertia, and I wouldn’t say Larson 100 percent nails it. But there’s a nihilistic charisma to her performance that works well, and there’s a bravery to her taking on this role that can’t be faulted.
Fish is an intriguing director, largely unknown in the UK beyond...
