Electra/Persona at the National Theatre review: A dull mash-up of Sophocles and Bergman
Electra/Persona | National Theatre (Lyttelton) | ★★☆☆☆
The best thing I can say about Cate Blanchett’s new play Electra/Persona is that it’s better than the last time I saw Elektra (spelled with a ‘k’ on that occasion). Last year Ms Marvel star Brie Larson took the lead in Sophocles’ tragedy, singing and yelling her way through a baffling series of one-sided conversations as robotic arms sprayed her and the rest of the cast with black paint. I described that production as “ambitiously avant garde yet utterly inscrutable” and honestly I could just copy and paste half of that review here.
This time we see Blanchett and Nina Hoss (they appeared together in the brilliant movie Tar) take the roles of the angry young Electra and her mother Clytemnestra. Borrowing a trick from Danny Boyle’s 2011 production of Frankenstein, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated who played the doctor and who the monster, Blanchett and Hoss ask an audience member to flip a coin each night. Tails it is: Blanchett plays Electra.
Like the Brie Larson production, Electra/Persona takes place on a big, stark, empty stage, this time given up entirely to a vertiginous flight of stairs. The biggest tension all night was the fear one of them might turn an ankle tottering up and down them.
The first act retells the story of Electra and Clytemnestra, taking place, coincidentally, in parallel to the events in Christopher Nolan’s record-breaking box-office smash The Odyssey. Electra is cross that her mother murdered her father Agamemnon in his bathtub the day he returned victorious from the Trojan war. In fairness, Clytemnestra was cross that Agamemnon had sacrificed one of their daughters in exchange for fair winds to carry his fleet to Troy, which is bound to cause a bit of a domestic.
The pair bicker and make up and force each other to recreate the murders of their loved ones but it’s all strangely… dull. Blanchett has a sinewy, feline magnetism but even her star power can’t quite illuminate these dense, abstract exchanges.
As the title suggests, this production isn’t just a retelling of Electra: it’s also a spin on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, in which an actor playing the Greek princess suffers some kind of breakdown, becoming mute mid-performance. So Blanchett becomes the silent actor Elisabet Vogler and Hoss her loquacious nurse. This act also introduces the use of live video, with high-definition black and white footage beamed onto a huge screen that lowers onto the stage. Blanchett’s face in extreme close-up as she hides beneath a fur coat. Blanchett’s face in extreme close-up as she reclines on a beach. Blanchett’s face in extreme close-up as she sits beside a campfire. It’s basically all Cate Blanchett’s face, narrated by a chatty nurse.
The production is at least visually arresting, filled with moments of exceptional artistry. Dry-ice machines create little clouds that hang in the air; during the murder of Aegisthus, Electra spit viscous, blood-red liquid over him; smoke tumbles down the steps like a slow-motion river.
The second act does capture some of the surreal, dreamlike quality of Bergman’s masterpiece – but only some. In the end my frustrations outweighed my appreciation. I’m still not sure why we’re presented with this strange mash-up of a classic Greek text and a classic modern movie. What exactly is it trying to say? That in a patriarchal society, women are still pitted against one-another? That grief is so powerful a force it spans millennia?
Electra/Persona is a long and plodding journey without any particular destination, albeit one with moments of real beauty along the way. It’s telling, I think, that Blanchett and Hoss received a bigger round of applause when they appeared at the start to flip the coin than they did after the curtain came down.