The Ancient Greeks are definitely having one of their periodic ‘moments’ in London theatres: shortly after the NT’s ‘Antigone’ rewrite ‘The Other Place’ and Robert Icke’s ‘Oedipus’ wrap up and running concurrently with the Old Vic’s, uh, ‘Oedipus’, here’s a fresh take on Sophocles’s ‘Elektra’ from Canadian poet Anne Carson, directed by Daniel Fish, who made his name with his bold recent take on ‘Oklahoma!’. Toss in legendary choreographer Annie-B Parson and that’s quite a conglomerate of New World talent for this most Ancient World of plays, but the real story is Brie Larson, who’ll be playing the title role of Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon who vows revenge upon her mother Clytamnestra for his death.
Larson is of course best known for playing Captain Marvel in the MCU films, to slightly mixed success (‘Captain Marvel’ was a box office beast; ‘The Marvels’ tanked so hard people started writing think piece about how superhero movies were over). It’s always been clear there’s a lot more to her than that, not least because she’s is a literal Oscar winner thanks to 2015’s psychological kidnap thriller ‘Room’, but she also writes, directs, produces and has an indie-leaning CV if you take out the 'lady with magic space powers' stuff. Getting involved with all this leftfield theatre royalty feels like a smart move and an interesting challenge – she’s done little in the way of stage work before and this will surely be something of a baptism of fire.
She'll be supported by a cast that includes fellow US star Stockard Channing, plus Greg Hicks, Patrick Vaill and Marième Diouf.
