It feels like a very Greek summer here in the UK. The ground is scorched, it last rained months ago, and the giant publicity machine for Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar-grossing The Odyssey – from red-carpet frocks to professorial disapproval – is a Charybdis, swallowing all other cultural events in its gaping maw. Mere Mortals – San Francisco Ballet’s astonishing work inspired by the story of Pandora – runs in Edinburgh this month before going to Sadler’s Wells in September. And Greek tragedy continues to fill London’s theatres.
Last week, I went to see Simon Stone’s reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Bridge theatre in south London, and it was packed. Even on a Thursday afternoon, there was a huge audience for the story of a family who turn on one another, wreaking intergenerational violence until their whole house lies in tatters and madness. Partly that is because of the excellent cast: David Morrissey and Mary-Louise Parker play Christopher and Montie – a modern Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, their marital squabbles fizzing back and forth until he cracks and she snaps. Their children are the ones who will have to try to reconcile the impossible: duty to their murdered father, respect to their murderous mother.
Partly it is because Stone has earned his audience for Greek tragedy. His version of Phaedra with Janet McTeer at London’s National Theatre in 2023 blended Euripides, Seneca and Racine. And his adaptation of Euripides’s Medea, starring Marieke Heebink at the Barbican in 2019, remains one of the best things I have ever seen. This modern-day version began with Medea leaving the asylum where she has spent the past year, after attempting to kill her ex-husband for his infidelity to her and their children. The dread piled up like bodies as the play moved to its wrenching conclusion. These very different plays posed a similar question: what do women do with their rage, if speaking it goes unheard?
The hottest Greek ticket of the year, though, is surely for Cate Blanchett in the upcoming Electra/Persona by Benedict Andrews. Electra is a fascinating choice, not least because we have three different versions of her story: Sophocles and Euripides each wrote one, and Aeschylus’s Choephoroi covers the same part of the myth. There are plenty of variations between the three, not least because Euripides takes potshots at Aeschylus’s version, mocking a recognition scene that depended on Electra identifying her long-absent brother from a lock of hair and a footprint, both of which (implausibly) resemble her own.
But the essential beats of her story are these: Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra feels wholly justified in her actions, because Agamemnon had killed her older daughter 10 years earlier. She has spent the whole Trojan war waiting for the chance to take her revenge. But her surviving children – Electra and Orestes – cannot forgive her for killing their father, no matter the reason. Orestes has grown up away from home, biding his time.
Sophocles’s Electra has nowhere else to go: she cannot leave home, because she is a young woman and ancient Greek mores require that she live in her father’s house until she marries. Which she cannot do, because Aegisthus and Clytemnestra know she hates them, so any husband (or son she may have) would be turned against them. Electra is essentially imprisoned in the home of the people who killed her beloved father, with no hope of parole.
This is the role that was being performed by Elisabet (played by Liv Ullmann) in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychological drama, Persona, before she has a breakdown and stops speaking. Alma (Bibi Andersson) is the guileless young nurse tending to her, sharing stories of her own life to fill the silence, until she finds that Elisabet is studying her. It is a film that has perplexed critics, unable to decode the women’s strange, strained relationship.
But Electra is always a perplexing character, with warring emotions: love for her father, disregard for her late sister, loathing of her mother, and her pulsing heartbeat of rage. One reason these Greek tragedies keep finding an audience is that they give voice – and terrible action – to unheeded female anger. Medea doesn’t accept her abandonment, she destroys everything her husband has and wants in a single day. Clytemnestra doesn’t accept her daughter’s murder, she avenges it. And Electra doesn’t accept her father’s killing, but (like Hamlet) she doesn’t have the strength to act alone against her mother. These women are extremists – like many characters in Greek tragedy – but their rage is more powerful because they have been silenced and ignored. If modern theatre audiences are anything to go by, their days of silence are behind them.
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Natalie Haynes is presenter of Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics on Radio 4, and author of books including Stone Blind and Pandora’s Jar
