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Mearound 420 BC, Sophocles composed Electra, in which the subject avenges the murder of his father and mother, Clytemnestra. In 1966, the Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman, made his debut Manin which a mad nurse, Alma, takes care of Elisabeth, an actress who is destroyed while playing Electra. The two plays, written 23 centuries apart, now share a stage in the National Theatre’s exciting production.
In Electra/ManDirector Benedict Andrews interweaves these stories before and after, which are linked by a stunning theatrical takeover at the end of the first half. “Persona is the pinnacle of modern cinema and Bergman is the north star for me,” says Andrews. “I’ve been fascinated by the impossibility – in a good way – of making Persona, because it’s very difficult for the camera and the silence and the closeness: the face as a place. And I’ve always been interested in why Bergman chose to have Elisabeth disappear when she plays Electra, so I wanted to put it together.
In the beginning, Andrews (born in Australia, living in Iceland and known as “Ice-Stralian”) had the idea that Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss would replace the roles of Electra and Clytemnestra in Electra, and Elisabeth and Alma in Persona; whoever plays Electra in the first half also appears as Elisabeth, and Clytemnestra also appears as Alma. The original plan was for Blanchett and Hoss to throw a coin on stage at the beginning of the evening but Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the coin lands on heads. 92 times in a rowmade the process dangerous.
Andrews added: “But I also said to Cate and Nina, ‘Do you have to get up in the morning and do your best game to read your lyrics for Electra or Persona?’ And they said maybe. Eventually, they’ll have a schedule and alternate night after night but the audience doesn’t know who’s playing until the first one enters. ” And if I tell the box office that I have seen one group and want to see the other, when will they tell me? Andrews paused. “No.”
Although he is known for creating new types of plays – including Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. at the Donmar Warehouse in 2024and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire on the revolving set at the Young Vic in 2014 – Electra/Persona is a brave work. Another novelist, Alan Ayckbourn, once said that, in editing, he found himself cursing what the author had given him to do. Did Andrews understand what it would be like to rehearse two plays twice to prepare for the various permits?
“Yes. Long days of practice,” he sighs and laughs. “Yesterday, strangely, we spent the whole day at Electra but I still did an hour on Persona at the end. I think it’s important to do both every day. Although they require very different energies. It’s not two coins; it’s one. italic work. There are bursts from Bergman in the first half and from Sophocles in the second half. “
Meanwhile, Andrews sees himself as a director: “We have this joke with the cast that there was a writer. We call him Dominic. He was tied to a table for two weeks here to rewrite but now we’ve put him on a trawler back to Iceland.”
Recently I saw a show where the student was there – he acted like an actor who has never been there, which is similar to what happens. But will Blanchett and Hoss have a different relationship? They are two amazing actresses but they just play their instruments differently. film libraryin which Nina plays Cate’s wife. So I thought it would be good to do something with them. They don’t look alike but there is an echo between them: they could be sisters. In the repetition, you see them thinking, ‘Oh, they did that slowly? Do I take that or do I just interpret it myself?’ We’re looking for something where everyone plays with the idea of what’s going on, but it can be seen in different ways.”
When I tell him that his Donmar Warehouse Cherry Orchard was very different from the two times I’ve seen it, he nods enthusiastically, although some directors allow this in interviews. “Okay!” He says. “I saw (the romantic rejection) between Lopakhin and Varya several times in rehearsal and then in performance – and it was different every time. And I encourage this because, in the end, you want the truth of the moment to be played every night.
Andrews has a Greek background, her previous production being the Icelandic version of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, which shares characters with Electra including Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra herself. So there’s a big overlap between his Greek background issues? “Great. I moved a little between the two shows. I spent a lot of time last year writing the text of The Oresteia. Then there was a gap before the rehearsal – to be translated into Icelandic – where I wrote Electra / Persona. What I didn’t expect to happen so quickly. I didn’t expect to have such a crazy family!”
Both shows are chamber pieces – five actors in Reykjavik, four in London – so apart from the exchange of Electra / Persona, there is also a play, in which the back stories of people who are not on stage are played: “Sometimes it’s like a Gestalt. an exercise where you play your oppressor. And ‘man’ and the word masks, for the roles we play. The king and the judge wear those robes and perform those roles. How does theater challenge all of these power relations? But, in a way, how does theater allow us to ask all the questions we do in our lives, our thoughts and our dreams?”
From the conference room at the National Theater where we speak, it’s a short walk to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey at the BFI Southbank or Simon Stone’s. The Oresteia at Bridge Bridge. If the descendants of the ancient Greek writers were on the payroll, they would all have private jets. “Yes! I think they are coming back at this time because, in these times of great political and moral crisis, we need them. The reason we are digging in the Greek rubbish and soil is that the play was made in a warring empire, which was once successful and then collapsed.
“We grew up with the idea that the US – our Rome, our Athens – was a military power and a cultural power. And it is breaking. So we return to a culture that lived in war and gave us philosophy and theater and gave Freud the Oedipus myth of opening the family.
There is an increasing number of Australian consultants in London. As well as Stone, whose Oresteia follows his Phaedra and The Lady From the Sea, Kip Williams works regularly in the city: recently on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and Maids. Does Andrews have a WhatsApp group or barbecues to reunite with friends from other countries? “No, but Kip was my assistant director. Simon did my production, and I’m spinning in a glass box in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We all know each other and we have shared assistants.”
Andrews, Stone and Williams all riff on old records – is this Australian? Is it a form of anticolonialism or republicanism? “When I made my first Three Sisters in Sydney, (Chekhov’s) tradition was still lace and fabric. doing the same thing and perhaps we were fighters against the conservatism of the Australian government at the time. But I worked a lot in Germany, where critical thinking is what a director does, so it didn’t make sense to me to be ‘faithful’ to the classics. What does this mean? I don’t think of it as tampering with the classics. I’m trying to find the power of myth in the piece; X-ray internal definition. “
