Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Mickey Jo
Now, it's possible I'm a little scarred by my most recent visit to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End, but after what I'd been hearing about this production, I was walking in there tonight really expecting to hate this. And to my extraordinary surprise, I didn't. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and this evening I was invited to see a press performance of Elektra, specifically Anne Carlson's translation of the Sophoclean Greek tragedy in a bold new production directed by Daniel Fish and starring Brie Larson. And ahead of all of the reviews for this coming out tomorrow night, I am anticipating this being a divisive production. It is an experimental piece of theater. You may have seen Daniel Fisher's work in the recent reimagined revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma that was seen on Broadway, touring around the US and recently in London. That will give you a pretty strong idea of the kind of theater that we are dealing with here. There's an awful lot to unpack about this. We're going to be talking about who this is for and whether this is even being performed in the right building and the ethos behind it, and whether it's pretentious and whether that's a bad thing. But my attempt here, as I talk through just about every facet of this production, including its creative choices and the performances of its cast, is to convey to you that this is not the tragedy it is being made out to be on social media. That being said, as we know, art is inherently subjective and I am very curious to hear the opinions of other theater goers as well. If you have already seen Elektra in the West End or on its pre West End run in Brighton, let us know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. As always, make sure you're subscribed. Make sure you're following me wherever you are, seeing my face or hearing my voice, so you don't miss any of my upcoming reviews. It is a huge week for plays here in London, including Greek tragedies. This is my first of two before Friday, so if you like this one, there is plenty for you to look forward to. Here it is what I thought of Elektra. Let's start with the big picture stuff then. This is a bold production from Daniel Fish. Like I said, experimental, bound to be divisive. It is inherently, I think, quite pretentious. And on the one hand, I think it presumes a certain amount about your familiarity with Greek tragedy and the context in which all of this is happening, because it does not contend with the labor of storytelling all that much. That being said, I think Anne Carson's beautiful poetic translation of the Sophocles is not that inaccessible. And we have to understand this is Greek tragedy. This is not Shakespeare. There are not a million characters with various different political allegiances speaking in Old English about their secret agendas. This Greek tragedy, like many others, has a plot that can be explained in about three sentences. This essentially is taking place after the Trojan War, post Battle of Troy, Big horse, all that stuff. And Agamemnon, who helped to lead an army in the conquest of Troy, has since returned home and been murdered by his wife with an axe. This was done in league with her lover, who now sits on the throne beside her. This, I believe, is Agamemnon's cousin, Aegisthus. None of this, I should add, happens during the events of the play. This has all taken place previously. We meet Elektra, who is one of the children of the king. She is understandably devastated about his death, furious with her mother in a very ancient Greek Hamlet, sort of a way, she is pinning all her hopes on the return of her brother, Orestes. She is devastated when reports come of his untimely death. We come to find out, however, that this isn't actually the truth. As part of an elaborate ruse, he returns to his family home and murders his mother and sets about killing her lover. And that is. That is where the play ends. Not that many things happen. Just like how in Oedipus. Not that many things happen. These are not plays about events. These are plays about emotions and about relationships and about fateful choices and philosophical quandaries and moral implications and everything playing out in this wild emotional spectrum because you have the divine intervention of the gods, who they are beseeching and appealing to and enraging all the time. Hell, the alleged reason that Clytemnestra killed her husband in the first place is because she was still salty about his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, which itself was done at the behest of the goddess Artemis. And again, it was all to do with the Trojan War, which was kind of Aphrodite's fault. And if we go back far enough, everything is Zeus's fault. Like, eventually, like, if you go back, it's all Zeus's fault anyway. The point of all this is, why do we revive Greek tragedy? Why do we stage Greek tragedy if it's not about events? Because we're so used to, in contemporary theater, storytelling and a strong narrative, and the absence of that in this, I think, is part of what has been turning off audiences. I have to assume that the appeal for a director, especially a director like Daniel Fish, who likes to really evoke themes, is, you know, the space in which to do that. When you're really just focusing on Elektra's rage and on the emotion of it all, it's. It's a blanker canvas than most because you don't have the labor of storytelling, you don't have the necessity of storytelling. Which brings us into an important question. To what extent do you need to be familiar with the context and the history and everything that happened before the events of this play? And this production would seem to contend that you don't, because it ostensibly doesn't concern itself too much with the political background. The focus here, here really is on Elektra and her emotional response to all of this. And I think it tries to draw parallels between that and between the rage that you may feel in the current political climate, the rage that women may feel in response to, you know, politicized attempts to police their bodily autonomy, a whole host of things. The anger that the younger generation may feel amidst the climate crisis. It's that feeling of hopelessness and injustice. That is what Elektra is experiencing and that is what Daniel Fish is focusing on here, more so than, like, the Greek history of what happened beforehand. I did know a little bit of the background and a lot of the Trojan War stuff, both because of studying the Aeneid at school and also because of having watched the film Troy with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. Listen, we can find education in different places, but I think it's also possible to enjoy this entirely on its own terms. And I am a firm believer in the fact that you shouldn't have to do homework before going to see a show. That being said, I do think theatre makers are still entitled to create work for the people that will have that contextual knowledge. It's a little bit like a terrific glass of wine. Like, you can still taste that it's good, but you also have to develop a taste for it, if that makes sense. We'll circle back to that metaphor, because on the other side, my major criticism of a production like this is I don't know what we're meant to be feeling and I don't know to what extent we are feeling anything, what emotions is this inspiring, if any? And is that not a huge shortcoming if it's just, you know, thought provoking and challenging and divisive and fascinating to unpack? Even if it even is any of those things, if it's not making you feel something, if it's not inspiring that same fury in you, if you're not absorbing the woe and the grief and the devastation of it all, is that not a failure of this story and of these characters? And would a production with a little more clarity, a little less literal, pretentious haze, not be better equipped to convey some sort of a statement, some sort of a message? But the idea you might benefit from having contextual familiarity is not unique to this production. In fact, you could say the same thing about Captain Marvel, the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film for which Brie Larson is perhaps best known to many audiences, for a lot of audiences, potentially. The reason they've booked tickets to go and see her in Elektra, inarguably, to enjoy that film wholeheartedly and entirely, you ought to have familiarized yourself with the Marvel Cinematic Universe films which came beforehand. Even though it's a prequel, to gain an appreciation for all of the supporting characters you encounter and for the weight of it all and the implications of it all, you can enjoy it on its own terms. But to fully appreciate and understand it, you need to have seen, like, upwards of a dozen films. So if we're calling this elitist and pretentious for expecting audiences to have done a certain amount of theatrical homework, then you could say the same thing about that movie. Anyway, I've talked enough about the ethos and the philosophy of this piece of theatre. Let's actually talk about it. And don't get me wrong, there were still plenty of elements of this that I found dizzyingly confusing and alienating. There was a blimp hovering above the stage throughout the duration, and I have no idea what this was meant to correspond to, other than imagery perhaps evoking a totalitarian regime, talking perhaps about fascism with, you know, this kind of coup of the throne. Side note, was it a blimp or was it a zeppelin? And what indeed is the difference between the two? You can answer me in the comments if you have anything to share. I don't really have time to pause. I also found many of the other staging and design elements similarly confusing. I didn't derive much from the rising and the falling of this sort of semicircular white cloth, other than one moment where something was put Onto it, which we'll talk about when I talk about the more impactful moments of the piece. I don't know that I inferred much from the costuming. Everyone in these sort of creamy like creme brulee color silk pieces with the royals in furs and oh my gosh, the football boots. The football boots I found very confusing. Everyone in these black laced up like ankle high football boots. But Elektra's sister wearing a pair which were like electric blue and Orestes were red or like a sort of a coral. I thought some of the blocking was pedestrian, almost amateurish, with Elektra upstaged, facing away from the audience, delivering a hugely important speech to her mother during their one and only interaction. This happened a handful more times and for so many of the choices that did really land with me that I thought were effective and powerful, they didn't really feel like home runs in each inst. There was something about them I wish had been taken a little further. I wish had been given a little more impact and meaning. The thing that I was searching for here was meaning. But there is a lot that I was able to take from it. Here is my biggest takeaway. I think the most important relationship in this was that between Elektra and the chorus. It's an all female chorus. They spoke almost always in unison in this sort of pitched, harmonized delivery. It wasn't quite singing, although it featured a handful of sustained notes. It was more like if you auto tune in a section of dialogue. But it was stirring to listen to, which also made it engaging. One of my favorite depictions of a Greek chorus that I've recently seen. The Robert Icke Oedipus over the Winter decided simply to do away with the chorus. I haven't seen the other Oedipus yet at the Olfic, but my understanding is that it's been turned into movement and dance. This one I thought was a really, really brilliant and effective use of the chorus. My issue is that they had one longer section towards the end of the thing, which was one of the more poetic and inaccessible sections of dialogue. And that is where we were really CR crying out for imagery. This I thought was a major disappointment and shortcoming, that we didn't use more political imagery. There was one moment, oh, a confusing moment at the climax of the narrative as Orestes is sneaking back into his family home in order to murder his mother and then reveals this to her lover, the king. And the lines of Anne Carson's translation of Elektra were interspersed with Audio recordings from a news report about some sort of unspecified tragedy. I've been desperately trying to figure out exactly what this was and what the relationship of this is to Elektra. And my only inference here is that this moment, historically in Elektra is the moment where Clytemnestra's body is concealed under a sheet. And Orestes, who is not recognizable to his family for reasons, pretends that he is about to present his own body, the body of Orestes, to Aegisthus. But then it is revealed to be Clytemnestra. And so these news reports of people going and finding and identifying the bodies of their loved ones has some sort of resonance there. But without any kind of imagery to link to that, it was confusing. I also think the play had the capacity to speak very much to the ongoing climate situation and also to the political climate, but it sort of refused to do so, or just wanted to let the emotions of the thing and the comparison within that speak for itself, which they did to some extent. In the scene that I mentioned, when Elektra is arguing with her mother, you feel the familiarity of not necessarily a conversation with a parent about them killing your other parent, but it felt like a challenging conversation about political difference or some kind of other intergenerational divide. It definitely felt like it had a kinship to that. And while I am hugely fatigued by this current popular acting trend of actors delivering everything with a more limited emotional spectrum, with us not venturing to a melodramatic place with everything being played smaller and more sullen and stoic, I do think that that being Elektra's mood throughout the Thing, as played by Brie Larson, spoke to that post traumatic, post grief kind of a shutdown. The same thing that we may be experiencing in the political landscape with the climate crisis, where you're so overwhelmed by the impossibility and the injustice of it all that it just leaves you feeling angry, but in a way that is defeated. But I would have loved a little more emotional variety. I would have loved more like political imagery, especially in those moments when the text was a little more alienating. But it's that relationship between Elektra and the chorus that I really connected to the chorus depicted as a group of women. I interpreted this as women of the community of the area. Important they're women because it's not that she's being judged by them or cast out necessarily, but they are speaking to her in a way that seems to diminish her entitlement to her own feelings and to her own rage. And they often her a sort of a generic encouragement peppered with platitudes. And she defies this and stands firm in her furious conviction, the context of which, I think in this production scarcely matters. She's angry about the death of her father, but really it doesn't matter. It's about a woman finding this capacity for vengeance and having this capacity for vengeance and for fury and for rage and forsaking these presumptions of femininity that are in many ways being reinforced by the chorus. Elektra becomes a character grounded in her humanity rather than her femininity. And I think that's super interesting. Now, we've spoken about the character a lot. Let's talk about Brie Larson's performance as Elektra. Like I said, directed within this more limited emotional spectrum, but still found a tremendous amount of reality within that. Within that rage. It was sardonic, it was sarcastic. There were a couple of moments of bleak, dry humor. She's got a buzz cut. It's very Sinead O'Connor tearing up the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. RIP Sinead O'Connor. By the way, I think you'd have loved this production of Elektra, but everything about how she is characterized and how she is attired in this production with the buzz cut, with a bikini kill tank top. Who, an American punk rock band with a strong feminist ethos, really conveys this idea of Elektra as this modern, anarchic leftist activist, a black sheep among her family. She is wielding microphones like she's delivering slam poetry. Some of them do different things and amplify and loop and distort her voice in different ways. There's a little bit of a technical problem here in that this allows her voice to soar well above the others in terms of volume. And despite the fact that I was sat reasonably close to the stage, like only about the fifth row, I did think that everyone else was rendered very quiet and a little harder to hear, if only by comparison. If she hadn't been using microphones, I wonder if it would have seemed a little more natural. But in response to her, when half of the scene is being played into a microphone and the other half isn't, it was a little harder to hear Patrick Vale as Orestes. It was a little harder to hear Stockard Channing as Clytemnestra. There's also a little vocal affectation that Brie Larson performs every time she says the word no, where it's, like, sustained and pitched on a Higher note, which towards the end of the thing is delivered very defiantly in the face of this dethroned dictator who wants to have the final word. Which felt to me like a very understood guttural response in response to male political entitlement. And it's an affected choice. It's not naturalistic. It was part of a handful of repeated gestures and noises that accompanied the names of different characters. We heard what I believe to be a gunshot after the name of Agamemnon. Each time it was spoken to remind us presumably of his murderous demise. There was a fist beat to the chest every time Orestes name was said to remind us of his allegiance to Elektra and her cause and their kinship to each other. There was a spit take to indicate the disgust for Aegisthus. A whole host of things like that which I thought were helpful and stylistic and I liked. And it gave the whole thing this very ritualistic sort of religious ceremonial feel to it as well. Brie Larson's Elektra is part anarchist leader at a rally, part slam poet, part priest at a pulpit, all mixed together. I also thought in particular that Stockhard Channing and Patrick Vale among the company did great work. Stockholm Channing is featured only very briefly in this piece. Patrick Vale has a handful of moments where he plays what are technically different accomplices to Orestes who are trying to propagate the false news of his death prior to his arrival. We don't see those in this version of Elektra. We just see them represented by him each time, which they may as well be. The first time we meet him, he's dressed as a race car driver and he is describing Orestes demise as a result of what I believe is a chariot accident. But the way it's delivered was made to sound like sports commentary, which I thought was an inspiring choice. You could inject a little more humor with that. There could be a little more humor throughout. I think that's a neglected device in this play. But I also think that Daniel Fish is a director who seems to concern himself more with the aesthetic of it all. And there were some strong aesthetic moments. The center of the stage features a revolve with a couple of strange looking devices on it. Turning for much of the play we come to find out that one of those is a rigged, I guess, a spray can that sprays a black line along this back cloth on the back wall, which slowly begins to drip down. That same black line is smeared across many of the company's costumes. And Elektra gets painted with it as it passes her. And there is black, inky splatter across her neck and it's dripping down her arms as it's dripping down the background. It feels like this infection, like this poison, like it's representative either of the darkness of their circumstances or by the inherent moral darkness of resolving to murder and seek vengeance. Because both the king and queen already have these black marks on them. Orestes already has this black mark across his stomach. The Greek chorus already have these black marks smeared across their costumes. Is this meant to suggest that they are complicit in. In some way? I think I could spend a long time just considering the way in which this was utilized and the meaning of it all. But I also think while I want every single iteration and second of all of these directing choices to be entirely purposeful, it doesn't always feel like they are parts of the production feel a little more haphazardly placed. There is a moment when Orestes returns. By the end of this scene, he will be reunited with his sister. But at the beginning she doesn't recognize him, he doesn't recognize her, and he doesn't identify himself initially. Instead, he presents her with what he claims are Orestes remains, and she is understandably devastated by this. A few moments into this conversation, a smoke machine activates and fills the entire stage with a dense fog, obscuring both of these performers. We can hear their voices, but we can't see either of them, which is about as frustrating as it sounds. Now, if Elektra were to be downstage and Orestes is obscured from her, you could understand the meaning of that. That she can't yet glimpse who he really is. Or if he were to be like a shadow slowly moving through it. But there isn't anything nearly as purposeful as that. Eventually Elektra walks through the fog. Eventually it dissipates as it spreads out into the auditorium. But it also. And it's very possible the queue could have gone off slightly late, doesn't seem to begin at the moment that it ought to. It's one of many elements of this production that you sort of have to look at subsequently and try and unpack the meaning of. Or fo. Meaning onto which summarizes, I think, the entire thing. There were themes that emerged very strongly for me, but I don't think that it delivered its narrative in a particularly compelling, engaging or affecting way. It had a bold and often effective aesthetic, but there were many shortcomings in terms of the staging, in terms of the Sound design choices that more often than not were a barrier to us being able to see, hear, and really understand the piece. And while I will continue to defend the right of theater makers to create pieces of theater like this, which feel in many ways like the theater world's answer to modern art, which is thought provoking, which is divisive and a little more impenetrable, and not only not spoon feeding its audiences, but barely feeding them anything at all, like a sort of a hard fruit that you have to work out how to gain sustenance from. There is also, I think, a conversation to be had about defending the rights of audiences not to be alienated and baffled by these productions that don't accept the labor of narrative clarity and storytelling. And I actually think that embracing that burden would not diminish pieces of theatre like this. I actually think often it would enhance them. It's my assertion that this is in entirely the wrong theatre. This has no business being in the commercial West End. And the starry casting, I think, unfortunately draws an audience who are never going to enjoy this kind of theater. If you're going to go and see Stockard Channing because she was Rizzo in Greece, then going to see her as Clytemnestra in a Greek tragedy is just not the right way to do it. And I'm not shaming people. I applaud people for going to see different types of theater. But I also think we shouldn't punish bold and experimental versions of Greek tragedies for being exactly what they set out to be just because they're attracting a more commercial audience who aren't necessarily familiar with it contextually. That being said, they chose to go to the Duke of York's, they chose to cast Stockard Channing and Brie Larson. But is it a little bit like, and there's no way to say this without sounding elitist and pretentious, and I preemptively apologize, but is it a little bit like if your favourite chef from your local restaurant were to move to a Michelin star establishment and you follow them there, but you don't like the food as much? Does it mean that the food is bad or does it mean that it's just not to your taste? I don't think the quote unquote fanciest or the most expensive meals I've ever been served have necessarily been the best or the most satisfying. Is that a difference between, you know, more artistic and more commercial and satisfying and crowd pleasing productions? And it goes back to the metaphor about developing the taste for the wine. It's not that it's bad food. It's just an acquired taste. It's a taste that hasn't necessarily been acquired yet. Where I think this production would have made a little more sense would be somewhere like the Barbican, somewhere like the Almeida, somewhere like the Donmar Warehouse, where this kind of a production would have been more expected. And the cynic in me says that they're in the West End, both because of theater availability but also because they can make more money there. And the cynic in me also says we will see how that goes. In any case, those have been my mixed and complicated thoughts about Elektra. I enjoyed this. I enjoyed this an awful lot more than I thought that I would. It is, like I said, impenetrable. It is challenging. It is neither the most thrilling nor the most satisfying evening that I have spent at the theater so far this year, but it's also definitely not the worst. And I am perhaps more curious than ever to hear about your experiences with this production. If you have already seen Elektra, or if you go on to see it after I have shared this review, please, please, please comment down below with your thoughts about this production, this direction. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, thank you for listening to this review. If you enjoyed this. If you're curious about my thoughts about some other upcoming London plays, make sure you are following me or subscribe to wherever you are seeing my face or hearing my voice. And I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey Day. For ten more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey Day. Subscribe.