Thursday 30 August 2012

An Electrifying Performance

Sorry, the little guy in red with the horns made me do that baaaaad pun in the title.  I'm referring to the powerful production of Elektra by Sophokles at the Stratford Festival.

Elektra makes you realize that such famous plays as The Trojan Women and Oedipus the King are not typical of all Greek tragedy.  Perhaps those two are performed so often because they come closer to our modern notions of theatre, particularly as both contain strong doses of what today is called  "dramatic action".  Elektra is a much more ritualistic piece in which there is no dramatic action in the modern sense except at the very beginning and the very end.  In between there is an ongoing portrait of stasis.  Elektra, trapped in the household of her mother and stepfather, only grieves the death of her father and looks forward to revenge.  She is confronted by her sister Chrysothemis twice, and continues grieving.  She has a tense debate with her mother, Clytemnestra, and continues grieving.  The entry of the Old Man announcing the (untrue) death of her brother Orestes gives her more to grieve, and she continues grieving.  Only when Orestes finally arrives and executes judgement on Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos does Elektra move from grieving to exultation, as the play ends.

So how do you make such an apparently motionless play come to life?  Director Thomas Moschopoulos found some very imaginative solutions which were directly rooted in what is known about the performance practice of the ancient Greek theatre.  He had his chorus stay outside the arena for much of the play, putting them very much in contact with the audience.  Their singing depended on short and often-repeated simple melodic tags which took on a hypnotic air.  Chorus and characters often chanted to a strong rhythmic accompaniment, clapped or beaten with hands on tables or feet on floor.  This chanting gave a tremendous variety of tone colour to the play.

Perhaps most powerful of all was the director's insistence that the play is not a melodrama in which good triumphs over evil.  The special genius of this production was that the views pro and con at every step of the road were clearly and fairly presented to us.  We in the audience were left in the end with a feeling that Orestes' revenge murder of his mother and stepfather was as questionable a crime as their murder of Agamemnon, whose murder of his other daughter Iphigenia was in turn equally morally questionable.  No certainties here, except for knowing who died and at whose hand.  Each of us had to make up his or her own mind about which, if any, of these deaths could be accounted as morally justifiable.

What a contrast to our advanced North American ideas where truth and justice always have to declare themselves within the span of an hour-long TV show or a 2 1/2 hour movie!

All the members of the cast and chorus were impeccable, but the one you remember at the end of the performance is Yanna McIntosh as Elektra.  I've seen her give several memorable performances at Stratford in the past, but this one trumps them all.  The sheer variety of tone, expression, and physicality that she brings to 100 minutes of nonstop mourning is a textbook lesson in itself, and the truthfulness with which it all springs from Elektra's desperate situation makes it memorable in the extreme.  This goes to the top end of the shortlist of memorable Greek tragedy performances I have ever seen!

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