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 his cult ‘horny’ revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Both that and this feel like the director is trying out many, many different concepts from scene to scene and just seeing what sticks: here we have Larson singing or speaking into various treated microphones; Patrick Vaill’s Orestes describing his own apparent demise in the style of a race-car commentator; a lengthy section given over to the chorus singing; a bit where a lot of stuff is covered in black spray paint; a section where a country song drowns out all the dialogue; and let’s not forget the medium-sized blimp that lurks in the corner of Jeremy Herbert’s otherwise barebones set for no obvious reason.
I never felt Fish lost sight of the play, despite constantly throwing random stuff at us. But where Oklahoma! had an innate robustness derived from how famous the original musical is, I’d question to what degree the comparatively obscure Elektra can stand up to Fish’s process. He remains faithful to its essence. But will the average audience member appreciate that? He does little to help the viewer digest this odd work, in which the title character doesn’t technically do… well, anything, really. Instead Fish offers frenetic tonal shifts, which don’t obscure the story, but doesn’t exactly clarify it either.
The biggest problem for me was the use of Anne Carson’s poetic but starchy 2001 verse adaptation – there is some mordant wit in there but I’m not convinced the formality of the verse helped the drama. We get what the characters are feeling, but Carson’s mannered, sculpted lines feel like a barrier to actual emotional nuance, and seem uniquely jarring to Fish’s wild style. In particular, it’s hard to understand what Elektra is feeling at the end – which is a problem in a tragedy!
The subtext is ultimately that neither of this week’s crop of celebrity Sophocles adaptations can hold a candle to Robert Icke’s recent Oedipus, in which emotional clarity was everything. Daniel Fish and Brie Larson’s Elektra is a gratifyingly bone-ratting 75 minutes of punk rock theatre made with respect for the Ancient Greek tradition. But it’s a show in which you see what they were going for rather than really feel it.
