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Showing posts with label Electra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Electra. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
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Electra reviewed by David James
Rating:
Murder, betrayal and revenge never go out of fashion. These universal themes are what makes plays like Sophocles' Electra, first performed 2,400 years ago, continue to vibrate like a tautly pulled guitar string. Who can't sympathise with rage at a father unjustly killed, children abandoned by their mother and a metastasising cancer at the heart of government?
Dumb Wise Theatre's adaptation, written and directed by John Ward, keeps the poetic meter but updates the language, peppering the lyricism with "fuck you"s and a patchwork of contemporary references. Though the play nominally takes place in the ancient city of Argos, we immediately understand it to be a placeholder for a modern political patchwork that encompasses elements from the Arab Spring, Blairism and a PR conscious media landscape.
Underneath the modern elements, the core of the Electra is what Sophocles wrote: Queen Clytemnestra (Sian Martin) and her lover Aegisthus (Matt Brewer) have murdered the heroic King Agamemnon and assumed the throne. Agamemnon's son and rightful heir Orestes (Dario Coates) was exiled as a child and raised by rebels seeking to place him on the throne and his daughter Electra (Lydia Larson) rages against the injustices of her mother's court, praying for the day when her long-lost brother will return.
All this is played out on a dusty bare-knuckle boxing pit of a stage. It's bordered by a forest of glowing tubes and instruments on which the impressively multi-talented cast play the show's pumping score. As the performers move about they kick up billowing clouds of choking dirt, squeeze fistfuls of dirt and press their faces into it as if trying to commune with the land they're battling over. Underneath the soil is the eroded, abandoned tomb of the murdered King, a constant reminder of the guilt of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra and the fury of Electra and Orestes.
It's great stage design, and the gripping drama played out on it does it justice. Obvious highlights are Sian Martin's villainous Queen, portrayed as a public relations expert as she subtly weaves her personal story into the national narrative. Williams is amazing at showing the microseconds of emotional truth when her cool mask slips, revealing the paranoia bubbling up inside her. Matt Brewer's eloquent politician gradually sliding towards corruption also impresses - not an outright villain but corrupted by power and the decisions he made to seize it.
Best of all is Lydia Larson's Electra, who sets the stage alight. Larson is one of my favourite actors at the moment (brilliant in both Skin A Cat and Brutal Cessation) and knocks it out of the park. There's a lot of Hamlet in her Electra, she does a great line in rebellious seething and viciously worded denunciations of her mother and stepfather. She powers through the play like a guided missile, her arc taking her from angry, to very angry, to incandescently furious, ending up at cracked murderous joy. The only downside is that next to her tour-de-force, Dario Coates' Orestes is a bit anaemic.
The only real flaw is that Aegisthus' villainy is outdated. The era of the shinily suited PR-led centrist politician ended with Cameron's post-Brexit resignation in 2016. It's difficult to equate the id-driven chaos of Trump, the incompetent incoherence of May or the tweed honesty of Corbyn with Aegisthus' character. That the target of the show's fury is yesterday's news slackens its grip, and though there are attempts to keep things relevant for 2018 they don't quite work - for example, I have no idea what statement is trying to be made by having the diabolical scheming authoritarian quoting Jeremy Corbyn's "for the many, not the few" slogan.
Quibbles aside, Electra kicks ass. It's Greek drama firing on all cylinders: exciting, involving and exhilarating - and Lydia Larson gives what I can already tell is going to be one of my favourite performances of the year. Go see it.
Electra is at The Bunker until 24 March. Tickets here.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Saturday, November 15, 2014
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I wasn't going to write about last night's trip to LimeWharf. For one I'd already got my article about last night sorted, for another I'd arrived too late to see one of my friends perform and finally there are only so many hours in the day. But then you see something so eye-catching, so in tune with my tastes and so fundamentally magnificent that something must be said.
It was the end of a long night of performance art and the crowd had begun to dissipate. Having enjoyed Charlotte Wendy Law's great performance involving pomegranates, neat vodka and spiky bits of wood I was a bit hungry and considered heading off home. But then I was told to head into the back room by the organiser.
What I found there was something out of my science fiction electric dreams. Standing seven foot tall, bristling with white LEDs and singing a beautiful song was Electra. I felt like I'd slipped through the veil into an art deco Narnia governed by a high voltage White Witch. This is Geneviève Favre Petroff, who for seventeen minutes transmuted herself into a digital direct current of searing electricity.
The Electra transformation involves donning a pyramidal dress decorated with a hundred LED lights, accessorised with light covered rings, a bracelet, a necklace and a crown. Looking like a porcelain statue, Petroff sings ritualistic, mantric songs that revolve around transforming oneself into a piece of coolly logical technology. As she sings the lights on her body react to what she's saying, flickering and shifting as if her mind is wired into her surroundings.
The effect reminded me of watching oceanographic documentaries. Down at the bottom of the ocean lies a kingdom of perpetual night, populated by incredibly beautiful bioluminescent creatures that flicker and pulsate neon patterns through the gloom. These creatures are beautiful and alien, the significance of their intricate patterns known to them alone. Electra echoes this, her lyrics given new dimensions of meaning by the flickering of information from the darkness.
The performance also ties into my passions for artists that undergo a transformative process in order to perform. My favourite musicians are those who've sloughed off their 'real' selves like a snake leaving it's skin behind. I particularly love the aesthetics of musicians who transform themselves into a robotic form, like Daft Punk, Janelle Monae or Robyn. There's something beautifully synchronous about cool synthesiser sounds coupled with armour plating, flickering lights and glass visors.
Electra slots into this glove; less a human being and more a cybernetic AC/DC priestess, a tarot card come to life. The overall effect is an intoxicating mixture of power, a sinister Frankensteinian other-ness combined with a weirdly religious intensity. I seriously loved it - one of the most beautiful seventeen minutes I've experienced in quite some time.
Thanks to Laurie Bender for the photos.
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