27.02.2025

Just a dash of insurrection

Pat Taylor reviews Daniel Fish, Elektra, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, until April 12

There are two principal and very different versions of the Electra story - one by Sophocles, the other Euripides. For Sophocles, Electra is a heroine who has the fortitude to keep the wheels of justice in motion through years of stasis until it is time to rise up and wield the knife. Euripides, on the other hand, is not so sure of her moral right for retribution, and questions whether order is ultimately restored.

It’s important to make this distinction because Daniel Fish’s production of Elektra - note, that’s Electra spelt with a spray-painted rebel ‘k’ - says it is a modern staging of Sophocles’s text. Yet, for all the hardboiledness of his lead protagonist, this Elektra is no noble heroine seeking justice for her father’s murder. For sure, she is a warrior - but it’s as an “I’m at war with everyone” picture-perfect rebellious teenager, complete with girl-punk band Bikini Kill T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, baggy jeans, stomper trainers and prerequisite buzzcut.

Like any stroppy teen, Brie Larson’s Elektra makes her presence known as soon as she appears. Striding onto the stage, she takes up a microphone that hangs from on high and jolts the audience to attention from their pre-performance smalltalk with a sudden yell-sing “No!”

Don’t get me wrong, Elektra has much to be angry about. Her story is one of the ancient Greek sagas that tells of her father, Agamemnon, fighting in the Trojan war, and who, on returning home after many years, is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. They usurp Agamemnon’s Mycenae palace, his wealth and his status as king. Elektra, who has been pining throughout her childhood for her father’s return, is understandably traumatised by her mother’s treachery, and smuggles her younger brother Orestes away, fearing he is next in the firing line as the rightful heir. Elektra must now spend many more years waiting for Orestes to return and help her exact revenge on their mother and Aegisthus and retake the crown that is rightfully his.

This is when we come in: on the day of Orestes’ return. Elektra is not yet aware of her brother’s return, and the play begins with her telling her story, her grief, and her unrelenting desire for revenge.

Punk band

Fish’s production is built on the conceit of Elektra as lead singer of a punk band. In this way, while we watch her performance, at the same time we become confidants of her inner mental machinations. She sings and growls her discontent, spits every time she speaks the name of her mother and mother’s lover, and belts out every “No” in song, all the way through the play. But this is no galvanising cry for liberation a la Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’, nor an appeal for anarchy in the UK. Elektra’s androgynous look and slick version of defiance is every part the modern self-conscious misfit meant to appeal to today’s disaffected young, yet her self-absorption and obsession with revenge is such that she fails to take us with her and we remain mere spectators.

As Larson’s Elektra stalks the stage, shoulders hung heavy, she is the epitome of someone being eaten from the inside out by internalised grief and rage. It becomes apparent that although part of her fury is directed at her mother and stepfather, much of it is self-loathing because of her inability to avenge her father’s death with her own hands. Powerless to perform the act of revenge herself, Elektra has instead constructed a fantasy in which she has the starring role - the lead singer in her own band. Show me a teenager who hasn’t done that before.

Prowling round and round like a caged animal, Elektra is revealed as someone who is trapped - trapped by the thoughts that circle in her head and render her incapable of moving on, and by the limits of the patriarchal society in which she lives. Even though she is the daughter of a king, her status as a woman robs her of any agency to overthrow the status quo - except through marriage. As her sister says: why don’t you just marry yourself out of this miserable existence?

Elektra spins on a revolving centre stage as she performs, symbolically caught in the vortex of her thoughts. But instead of pulling us into her maelstrom, her relentless self-absorption, inflexibility and alienation from those around her have the opposite effect - and like a centrifugal force, we are pushed out, unable to empathise. The alienated alienates.

If punk Elektra is meant to be identifiable to the similarly disaffected and powerless, then she misses the mark. Her punching out lines and skulking around while wearing an expression that threatens to laser anyone who catches her eye, gives more the effect of a naive young thing playing at being the epic tragic heroine.

Even Elektra’s sister Chrysothemis has lost patience with her and has gone off to follow her own path of accepting what is and moving on. Only the Chorus are willing to stick around to listen to Elektra, try to soothe her, reason with her. The Chorus is done well in this production. The classical dramatic device of having a group of characters distinct from the story to comment on events, and fill in factual gaps to move the story on through song and dance is not an easy one for modern audiences to accept, but here it’s not a mental stretch. For the women of the Chorus are Elektra’s backing singers, spinning around the stage while harmonising with her dissonant protests. In contrast with the modern get-up of punk Elektra, the Chorus are robed in folds of golden silk that drop to the floor, like stately Doric columns.

The action alternates between the grounds of the Mycenae palace which is the home of Elektra and her family and the tomb of Agamemnon. The stage is bare of props and detail, a white screen at the back lifts and drops to mark the change from palace to tomb. The barren staging contrasts with the colourful clothing, including the floor-length fur coats worn by Clytemnestra and Aegesthus, as if to suggest that whatever they gained from the murder, it wasn’t all that much - an empty victory. There are episodes when a paint gun turning on the revolving centre-stage spatters black paint everywhere - on the white screen, on Elektra’s T-shirt, and the golden dresses and fur coats. It brings to mind the blood that stains the hands of Lady Macbeth, but with only a fragment of the impact value.

The vengeful slaying of Clytemnestra also fails to arrest. Let’s be clear, she is killed by her son, a deed that is facilitated by her daughter. It’s an act of such vile proportion that it should horrify us. Yet the violence and consequences are completely airbrushed out by this production, to be replaced with a recording of a news report that describes physical signs of torture on multiple women’s dead bodies. It’s not made known where the report is from and the effect just leads to confusion. Is Clytemnestra’s murder a metaphor for the violence inflicted against women through millennia; or is it that acts of revenge, however we may try to justify them, are never justified (is the news recording meant to evoke the Nova festival attack?); or is it just another brutal act in a long line of brutal acts in the pursuit of power? The confused staging doesn’t communicate any, but neither does it fulfil Sophocles’s conclusion that this is a righteous act sanctioned by the gods to restore order to the world. Fish’s Elektra is not a song for the successful struggle of the oppressed to overthrow a corrupt hegemony. There is no sense of tragic heroism in having to take your own mother’s life. It just ends, and the culmination of all Elektra’s resolve is an anticlimax. The production pulls its punches and lacks the courage of any convictions where it matters.

Elektra could be said to be the female equivalent of Hamlet. Like him, she stands alone in her protest and gradually disintegrates under her mother’s betrayal. However, although Elektra certainly has a chip on her shoulder, there’s little sense of the weight of responsibility she carries beyond white-hot rage. She is the one who leads the narrative as she cries her grief into the microphone, but there is no internal battle to come to terms with the destiny she must fulfil. She is a one-dimensional punk-rebel, not an epic tragic heroine who can speak for all the dispossessed.

Family history

Only her mother Clytemnestra, played by former Pink Lady, Stockard Channing, manages to conjure the depths of toxicity of the family and the inequity of society of which it is part. This is one complicated family history of power struggles, murders, adultery and infanticide that makes your average television soap opera seem like a simple tale of woe. She conveys the utter depths of grief from losing a child at the hands of her husband so well you can forgive her for taking his life. Not surprisingly, she got the rowdiest applause.

But in the end the play’s themes of revenge and justice are too watered-down in this production to pack any real punch, like when you order a mug of strong builder’s tea but get a weak, milky version in its place, as if someone is trying to save your stomach from yourself. This is a bland serving that lacks the shocking level of violence inherent in the original text, and in its confusing production fails to raise questions about insurrection and ending long cycles of corruption and violence.