{"id":956,"date":"2014-10-05T17:03:53","date_gmt":"2014-10-05T17:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=956"},"modified":"2014-10-05T17:03:53","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T17:03:53","slug":"elektricity-at-the-old-vic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2014\/10\/elektricity-at-the-old-vic.html","title":{"rendered":"Elektricity at the Old Vic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Old Vic Poster<\/p><\/div>\n

Incest, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and cannibalism are in Elektra\u2019s genes. The poor woman is descended from the House of Atreus, and these are just a few of the negative features of the lives and deaths of her ancestors. She makes an appearance in Aeschylus\u2019 Oresteia <\/em>trilogy and gets plays all to herself in Euripides and Sophocles.<\/p>\n

Sophocles\u2019 Elektra, like all Aristotelian Greek tragedies, happens in the course of a single day. Her mother, (who is Helen of Troy\u2019s sister) Clytemnestra has conspired with her present husband, Aegisthus, to kill Elektra\u2019s father, Agamemnon as revenge for sacrificing another of their daughters, Iphigenia. Elektra is full of grief for her dead father as well as hatred for her mother, and condemned celibacy by mother and stepfather, to insure that she does not have children who could challenge Aegisthus\u2019s rule<\/p>\n

On the day of the tragedy, Elektra\u2019s brother, Orestes, whom she believes is dead, returns to the bleak palace she inhabits. At first, for no evident reason, he pretends to be a messenger conveying Orestes\u2019 ashes. When he reveals to her his true identity, she rejoices because she knows he will take bloody revenge on their mother, Clytemnestra \u2013 which he indeed does.<\/p>\n

I find this a less convincing, and less interesting play than Antigone<\/em>, if only because Antigone, in wanting to bury her fallen brother, raises issue of state and policy that transcend her personal tragedy: the play is a clash between the duties owed the family and those owed to the state. In defence of Elektra<\/em>, there is Virginia Woolf\u2019s great statement on Greek tragedy in general:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In spite of the labour and the difficulty, it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the way we should behave thus struck down; the way in which everybody has always behaved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is a very good reason for cherishing Elektra<\/em> despite its slight dramatic inferiority to Antigone<\/em>, and in Frank McGuinness\u2019 translation, it is a marvellous event of poetry, especially in its current in-the-round production at the Old Vic, directed by Ian Rickson. This is his third London collaboration with Kristin Scott Thomas, and her performance is one for the history books \u2013 though also to their joint credit, this is very much an ensemble production, and no one who has seen it could fail to remark \u2013 and praise \u2013 Diana Quick\u2019s fearsome Clytemnestra, and the able support of Jack Lowden as a very young Orestes, as well as Peter Wight\u2019s excellent exposition in the role of the servant.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shabby sort of palace, marked only by a huge, intimidating door and a blasted tree-trunk, and designer Mark Thompson\u2019s peasant-y costumes are pretty grubby. What nobility there is has got to come largely from Ms Scott Thomas\u2019 bearing, gesticulation and gait. She looks almost emaciated, as though she\u2019s suffered from an eating disorder, but she can flag up her royal status with a glance of her eyes or movement of a hand. You get some idea of this from her red-rimmed eyes in the Old Vic poster: despite the ferocity, force and magnitude of the emotions she is conveying, there is an economy of gesture and posture about her acting of Elektra that makes you feel you\u2019re in the presence of true majesty, true sorrow and magnificent anger. Her need for vengeance doesn\u2019t feel like ordinary revenge, but like a need that is beyond the grasp and ken of us ordinary mortals. It is the highest praise for Ms Quick to say that she manages to make the audience feel that she knows how deep and devastating is her daughter\u2019s wrath.<\/p>\n

To me Virginia Woolf seems to have more to do with these central performances than does Jung\u2019s 1931 hypothesis about an Elektra complex. These are griefs and grudges as old as time rather than glitches in a girl\u2019s psychosexual development.<\/p>\n

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Incest, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and cannibalism are in Elektra\u2019s genes. The poor woman is descended from the House of Atreus, and these are just a few of the negative features of the lives and deaths of her ancestors. She makes an appearance in Aeschylus\u2019 Oresteia trilogy and gets plays all to herself in Euripides and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-fq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":957,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}