Some 2,000 years separate Sophocles’ tragedy “Electra” and Ingmar Bergman’s psychological drama “Persona,” but the former holds the key to understanding the latter. In Bergman’s movie, a stage actress goes mute while performing in a production of “Electra” because the filial rupture portrayed in Sophocles’ play echoes key events in her own life: The uncanny depiction of fractured selfhood in “Persona” originates in maternal trauma.
The resonances between these two canonical works are explored in an ambitious new play starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss that opened this week at the National Theater in London.
Titled “Electra/Persona” and running through Oct. 10, the production constitutes a triangular reunion for its Australian writer and director, Benedict Andrews, and its two leading actresses: Andrews directed Hoss in “The Cherry Orchard” and Blanchett in “The Maids”; and Hoss played Blanchett’s wife in the 2022 film “Tár.”
The play is not a straightforward mash-up but comprises two distinct, juxtaposed halves connected only by suggestive echoes and a running preoccupation with performance and the slipperiness of identity. In keeping with this theme, Blanchett and Hoss swap roles on alternate nights. On opening night, Blanchett played Clytemnestra, the glibly dismissive mother to Hoss’s splenetic Electra.
Unable to forgive her mother for killing her father, Agamemnon, and for shacking up with Aegisthus, his rival, Electra is so mired in grief that she has stopped eating and bathing. She rages bitterly while wielding a silver hammer. But Clytemnestra had her reasons: Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to secure favorable winds for a military expedition.
Blanchett’s Clytemnestra makes her case persuasively while nevertheless coming across as unnervingly disingenuous in her solicitude. She says she’s worried sick about Electra — and adds, turning her face to the audience, “We all are.”
The theme of performance is made explicit when Clytemnestra proposes a re-enactment of Iphigenia’s death in a therapeutic role-playing. Electra dons her late father’s military jacket while her remaining sister, Chrysothemis (Ella Lily Hyland), puts on a dress that belonged to Iphigenia. It’s a weird moment.
Later, Electra channels the spirit of her long-lost brother, Orestes, after donning his old track jacket, and exacts her revenge on Aegisthus (Patrick Robinson) in an arrestingly stylized manner. The hammer never makes contact; instead, Electra spits several mouthfuls of fake blood onto his face, and he drops dead. This is more ignominious, somehow, than any blunt-force trauma.
Hoss then falls silent, and the action stops for a few minutes. Stage hands mop up the blood while the actors impassively touch up their makeup, and we restart with Hoss as the mute actress, Elisabeth, recuperating under the care of a nurse, Alma, played by Blanchett. A large screen drops from the ceiling, synced to a hand-held camera that the actors train on each other by turns to produce compelling black-and-white close-ups. We are now in the world of Bergman’s film.
There are echoes of the Clytemnestra-Electra standoff as Blanchett’s obsequious, star-struck Alma conducts a one-sided dialogue with her mute charge. Coaxing concern meets a brick wall of withholding. Alma’s stilted professionalism gives way to guileless overfamiliarity, followed by resentment and pique. All the while, Hoss’s Elizabeth communicates through suggestive micro-expressions, half-repressed smiles and flickering, inscrutable winces.
This strange pas de deux is superbly modulated by Blanchett and Hoss as they range barefoot up and down the vast stairway that takes up the full breadth of the stage. (The set is by Magda Willi.)
Allusions to war and environmental disaster suggest the aggravating effect of world events, but the origin of Elisabeth’s predicament is personal, as we eventually learn: She gave birth to a child but felt nothing for it.
When Alma’s and Elisabeth’s identities seem to blur into one, raising the specter of madness, we are reminded of Chrysothemis’ earlier, pregnant remark that Electra and her mother were very much alike: “Sometimes I can’t tell where she ends and you begin.”
The classics have been in vogue on London stages lately. Two miles further along the River Thames, at the Bridge Theater, theatregoers can enjoy a very different take on Greek tragedy by another Australian director, Simon Stone. His modernization of Aeschylus’ “The Oresteia” depicts fraught parent-child dynamics in a “Succession”-style thriller that’s chock-full of gore, suspense and fast-paced action. It’s immensely watchable but might just as well have been a TV show. By contrast, the granular psychological focus of “Electra/Persona,” expertly served by the poised virtuosity of Blanchett and Hoss, feels made for the stage.
Yet for all the skill on show, the essayistic churning of theme (performance, ambivalence, the dualities of the self) in “Electra/Persona” becomes somewhat labored toward the end of the 130- minute, intermission-free run time. And the “Persona” segment, though stylishly rendered, feels inescapably like a homage — more reanimation than reinvention. The applause at the curtain call was enthusiastic but not rapturous — suggesting, perhaps, a greater appreciation for the performers than for the piece.
“Electra/Persona”
Through Oct. 10 at the National Theater; nationaltheatre.org.uk.
