elektra

photo: 1883 Magazine

Sometimes I see a show on the West End and wish that it was not in the hands of celebrity producers and performers. Brie Larson’s explosive performance of Elektra is a bold move from such a well-known actor but I can’t help but believe that is a production for fringe venues, rather than for a demographic that wants to be entertained. 

I am a big fan of Anne Carson’s work, studying it continuously throughout my university years, but I have never seen it performed live until this production, and I feel as though she has not been done justice. I always felt that Carson’s succinct translations truly got to the heart of what a Greek tragedy was about, but in this production I feel it is used more as a tool of what kind of Elektra they were creating, more than as the base of the production.

Larson’s grungy, edgy, pop-punk inspired Elektra performs in jarring, broken English, lacking the poetic nature of Carson’s work and reminding me of amateur spoken word performances. I felt as though I lacked an understanding of the narrative of the play despite being incredibly familiar with the original text. Perhaps it is my own judgement of spoken word as a creative medium, but I feel that Larson’s Elektra cannot be taken seriously, that her portrayal is playing a part rather than truly ‘being’ the character. This, coupled with a somewhat misogynistic portrayal of the character who seems to regard every other female character in the show with contempt in favour of a late father, means that I felt that they lost the essence of the original play. It therefore felt odd to me that in the programme, the creators of the show put such heavy emphasis on this Elektra as Woman. For me, a production cannot explore Woman through what appears to be a woman-hating woman.

With this production, along with many recent productions on the West End that include celebrity actors, it seems to me that Larson was directed differently to the other actors, or that they were not given as much time in rehearsals as Larson. Their performances were more powerful to me than Larson’s, riding the poetic nature of Carson’s work to pull emotionally at the audience, but unfortunately had little to work with. Indeed, I even felt that each episode with another one of the named characters was cut short, giving the actor little time to explore their character to the fullest. A perverted, slimy Aegisthus is an intriguing choice from Greg Hicks and I would have been keen to see more of this, but he is given such little stage time that it seems odd that this character was even involved in this production. 

I was however impressed with Daniel Fish’s chorus. A group of nameless women performing musical interludes in unison is one of the most historically accurate performances of a Greek chorus that I have ever seen, and tied in closer to the emotionally raw performances of Stockard Channing, Marième Douf and Patrick Vail than to Larson’s brutish, closed-off portrayal. I felt that this chorus tied the production together, but still left Elektra out in the dark. 

Overall, this production was quite a mystery to me. My overwhelming feeling was that had this production been presented at a fringe theatre festival it would have been met with rave reviews by an audience who could feel closer to the characters and themes of the play and understand better the creative choices that were being made. I don’t think that London’s West End is ready for theatre that is not so obvious about its meaning.