In around 420BC, Sophocles staged Electra, in which the title character avenges the murder of her father by her mother, Clytemnestra. In 1966, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman premiered Persona, in which a psychiatric nurse, Alma, is caring for Elisabeth, an actor who has suffered a breakdown while playing Electra. These two dramas, written 23 centuries apart, are now sharing the stage in an alluring new National Theatre production.
In Electra/Persona, director Benedict Andrews has paired the stories before and after the interval, linked by a stunning coup de theatre at the end of the first half. “Persona is a pinnacle of modernist cinema and Bergman is a north star for me,” says Andrews. “I’ve long been fascinated by the impossibility – in a good way – of staging Persona, because it is so much about the camera and the silence and the closeup: the face as a terrain. And I was always fascinated by why Bergman chose to have Elisabeth break down while playing Electra, so I wanted to put them together. I think it’s become clear in rehearsal that the whole evening is one cycle of grief.”
