Old Vic Poster
Incest, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and cannibalism are in Elektra’s 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’ Oresteia trilogy and gets plays all to herself in Euripides and Sophocles.
Sophocles’ Elektra, like all Aristotelian Greek tragedies, happens in the course of a single day. Her mother, (who is Helen of Troy’s sister) Clytemnestra has conspired with her present husband, Aegisthus, to kill Elektra’s 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’s rule
On the day of the tragedy, Elektra’s 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’ ashes. When he reveals to her his true identity, she rejoices because she knows he will take bloody revenge on their mother, Clytemnestra – which he indeed does.
I find this a less convincing, and less interesting play than Antigone, 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, there is Virginia Woolf’s great statement on Greek tragedy in general:
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.
This is a very good reason for cherishing Elektra despite its slight dramatic inferiority to Antigone, and in Frank McGuinness’ 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 – though also to their joint credit, this is very much an ensemble production, and no one who has seen it could fail to remark – and praise – Diana Quick’s fearsome Clytemnestra, and the able support of Jack Lowden as a very young Orestes, as well as Peter Wight’s excellent exposition in the role of the servant.
It’s a shabby sort of palace, marked only by a huge, intimidating door and a blasted tree-trunk, and designer Mark Thompson’s peasant-y costumes are pretty grubby. What nobility there is has got to come largely from Ms Scott Thomas’ bearing, gesticulation and gait. She looks almost emaciated, as though she’s 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’re in the presence of true majesty, true sorrow and magnificent anger. Her need for vengeance doesn’t 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’s wrath.
To me Virginia Woolf seems to have more to do with these central performances than does Jung’s 1931 hypothesis about an Elektra complex. These are griefs and grudges as old as time rather than glitches in a girl’s psychosexual development.
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