Electra

Electra (No White Elephant) runs at the Tap Gallery in Darlinghurst from June 5-15 2013. By Sophocles, directed by Richard Hilliar. 

No White Elephant’s production of Electra is a solid, clean version of Sophocles’ classic play. While it’s not especially adventurous, it is simple and elegant, showcasing the emotional turmoil of the participants in this horrific drama.

For those unfamiliar with the classics, a brief précis: Electra is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon (because Agamemnon made a religious sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia) and married his cousin, Aegisthus. Electra is enraged at her mother’s actions, and so hopes, prays, and plots for her banished brother Orestes to come home to assume his rightful place on the throne of Mycenae.  

The greatest strength in this production is its casting. Amy Scott-Smith is deeply compelling as the play’s title character. I would have liked to see a little more variation in her performance throughout the show – she ran the risk of being quite one-note – but she realised Electra’s passion and hatred wonderfully. Cat Martin was similarly watchable as Clytemnestra. As the play is told largely from Electra’s perspective, it would be very easy for Clytemnestra to come across as entirely villainous. Martin’s performance allowed us to sympathise with her character and understand her actions, complicating the moral universe of the show. The scene where she recalls how her husband Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis so he would be blessed with the winds that would take him to Troy was mesmerising. (I had mixed feelings about the way the Greek chorus was used in this show, but this is one instance where their actions heightened, rather than distracted from, the meaning of the show.)

I don’t know if it’s possible to do one of these Greek tragedies in Sydney at the moment without the inevitable comparison to Simon Stone’s production of Thyestes.(That play is set a generation earlier than this one – Agamemnon was the child of Atreus, while Aegisthus is the only living child of Thyestes.) One of the things I really liked about that production was not so much the rewriting but the starting point, the idea that THESE MYTHS ARE REAL (all caps theirs). There’s a tendency with the classics, which keep so much of their bloodshed offstage, for the tragedy to be mitigated for the audience: we forget just how violent and horrific these stories are. The front cover of the program for Electra shows Electra covered in blood, and I think I would have liked to see more of this onstage – not so much the blood, but the violence. The actual action of the play is elided – we know when it happens, because we see Orestes stalk into the wings after Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, but we never witness it. It becomes easier to excuse. This production did well at conveying the emotional impact this violence had on the characters – I must especially commend Nicole Weinberg as Chrysothemis in this respect – but I think actually witnessing more of the actual violence would have had a greater emotional impact on the audience. I’m not talking Thyestes-level this-is-so-violent-against-women-we-can’t-actually-have-female-actors-on-the-stage violence – it wouldn’t need to be stylised or eroticised – but I think actually performing the violence would have helped make it a little more real for the audience. It would have brought it home just what a terrible thing Electra and Orestes have done in the pursuit of justice.

Another thing the show addressed through its performances but I would have liked to see explored in a little more depth is this idea of female futility. At the beginning of the show, Electra is very much a Hamlet figure: she is determined to avenge her father’s death (and her mother has married an inappropriately close relation of said father), and she is going to talk about this – a lot. But whereas Hamlet eventually does take action, Electra can only wait. The only tangible action she can make is to tell Chrysothemis not to place tainted offerings on their father’s grave. When she thinks Orestes is dead, all her hope is lost. When Orestes does return to Mycenae, only then can she act. She essentially does exactly what her mother does – latch onto a male champion to rid her of her enemies. Scott-Smith did a great job of expressing Electra’s complete frustration at her inability to act, but it would have been interesting to get an insight into why Electra couldn’t act on her own: why, culturally, female action is even more taboo than killing your relatives.

While I think this piece could have used tighter direction in parts, Richard Hilliar has done a good job with this production of Electra. The Greeks are hard to tackle, and the show’s focus on the emotional complexities of the characters and how it motivates them to act made for some compelling theatre. The show ends on an indrawn breath, the gasp before a new beginning, new action, a new future. I, for one, will be very interested to see what the future holds for No White Elephant.

Strange Interlude

I reviewed Belvoir St Theatre's production of Strange Interlude - you can read my review (in which I have quite a different opinion to many others who have reviewed this show) here.

Thyestes

Thyestes runs at Carriageworks until February 19, 2012. By Simon Stone, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Winter after Seneca, directed by Simon Stone.
 

I seriously considered not reviewing this play. Not because I didn’t like it – it is one of the most amazing pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen – but because I really, really didn’t want to think about it again. Even now, I’m going to have to write this review quickly, because I can’t bear to dwell on it. Thyestes is theatre at its most visceral, its most bloody, an almost primeval experience of horror.

In fact, if I was being 100% accurate about my reaction to this show, I would probably just write HOLY FUCK over and over again. It was about all I was capable of saying for about half an hour after the show ended. I was very glad that I saw Thyestes as a matinee, that I could walk out into daylight afterwards. Walking out into darkness would have been... let’s just say I would have had nightmares.

This play, devised by Simon Stone, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Winter, takes Seneca’s tragedy as its basis. For those unfamiliar with the myth of Thyestes, here is a quick summary. Atreus and Thyestes are brothers who, after various political happenings, are joint kings of the land of Mycenae. Thyestes is exiled after sleeping with Atreus’s wife. Atreus, in a gruesome act of revenge, invites Thyestes to a feast, where the main course is Thyestes’s two young sons.

It is easy to read this, go, “ewww, gross”, and never think of it again. I majored in Classics at university, so I was familiar with the myth, but had never given it much thought. Like all classical myth, the modern reader is at a distance. We read about Zeus turning himself into a bull and raping Europa or Myrrha seducing her father, write essays on them, without really grasping the horror behind them. The starting point behind the Hayloft Project’s re-imagination of Thyestes was THESE MYTHS ARE REAL (all caps theirs and totally necessary). Thyestes takes place in the spaces between the myth, behind storybook politics. It takes away the distance between us and classical myth and locates it in the machinations of everyday. We see through the white box that is the stage to the audience on the other side. We see through the story to the horror – the horror inherent in the myths that were, in many ways, the genesis of Western society.

 
It’s easy to throw incest or cannibalism or rape or murder or violence or whatever into a play as a kind of cheap trick, some Big Issue (tm) with which to make the play seem shocking. When it’s done this way – done cheap – it makes something which is horrifying seem camp and almost comical. Thyestes has all of these horrible things in it. So many atrocities occur in this play it’s hard to recall them all. (I mentioned the scene where Thyestes rapes his daughter to my sister afterwards, and she said, “oh yeah... I forgot about that.” If you can forget about a scene as awful as that one, you know there is a metric fuck-ton of awful happenings in the play.) But this show does not use the horror inherent in the act to make theatre. Rather, it makes theatre to enhance the horror of the act.

During the last scene of the play (it ends in the middle, with the Thyestian feast), I seriously thought I was going to throw up. When the curtain went down, I was thankful that they’d left it at that, at Atreus’s eerie laugh. But no, it came up again. And again. And again. And each time was more and more horrible until, when it came down for the last time, I had literally broken out into a cold sweat. Stumbling out into the daylight, I still wasn’t sure whether or not I could keep myself from being sick. I knew this myth. I knew exactly what story I was in for on this rainy Wednesday afternoon. The cannibalism, the incest, the everything – it was not a surprise. And this play still made me feel like this – had an actual physical effect on me that it took many more glasses of wine than I’m proud of to calm myself down.

I can’t fault this play at all, but special mention must go to Mark Winter, who played Atreus. I don’t know if I have ever seen a more chilling performance. My sister, who is a psychology student, said that he was the perfect psychopath – outwardly charming, charismatic, funny, but inwardly twisted, perverted, mad. He was utterly, utterly terrifying, and because of him, I don’t think I will ever be able to eat spaghetti or choc-tops again.

Thyestes is not for the queasy. It is incredible theatre, but I would never, ever want to see it again. I don’t want to think about it again. But you should see it. You have until February 19. It is amazing. It is a theatrical experience that will give you nightmares, a theatrical experience that will probably have an actual physical effect on you, a theatrical experience that will ensure you never read myth disinterestedly ever again, a theatrical experience you will always, always remember – for both the right and the wrong reasons.