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The Electra bit of the title refers to the Sophoclean tragedy of a daughter trapped in a cycle of vengeance, the Persona part to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film about an actor who suddenly stops speaking while performing Electra on stage.
Benedict Andrews’ drama after Bergman and Sophocles first welds the two together, then raises the concept higher by enlisting his star castings in Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss to share the parts of Electra and her murderous mother, Clytemnestra, as well as Bergman’s inexplicably silent actor, Elisabeth, and her nurse, Alma, who fall into a disturbing, mirrored relationship.
The order of who will play whom is decided on the flip of a coin before each show every night. “Heads or tails?” Blanchett asks Hoss, after walking on, and gets an audience member to toss the coin. She wins, so it’s Clytemnestra and Alma for her, while Hoss plays Electra and Elisabeth.
It’s a clever twist (too clever?) that seems earnest in its intentions to eke out mother-daughter friction from each drama, as well as exploring ideas on performance, how actors assume roles and who they become when they are off-stage – rather than a production conceived as theatrical sport.
Yet, this intense, interval-free show is quite literally a game of two halves, Andrews’ overhaul of the ancient much more successful than his strangely sterile play on Bergman’s classic.
Blanchett and Hoss are thrown into a series of gladiatorial face-offs across the night and if Andrews’ idea to join up two such distinct dramas suffers from strain, they become his secret weapon. They shine, even when the awkwardness of Persona reveals its cracks.
The ancient comes first, with a searing performance from Hoss (previously in a shimmering production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Andrews). She plays a spittingly angry adolescent, ominously brandishing a hammer, who has an edge of the comic grotesque. She hates her mother but, it is clear, loves her too.
Blanchett, for her part, is commanding but less imperious than Stockard Channing’s Clytemnestra in the West End’s kooky Elektra. Beneath the hauteur (and occasional comic touches) she is beseeching, and convinces us of her right to seek vengeance for the death of her daughter, Iphigenia (sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, to appease the gods), so that mother and daughter seemed justified in their thirsty violence.
There is overt theatricality, face paint rubbed on, costumes donned, characters role-playing parts of their family story – Electra assuming the part of Agamemnon, or her brother Orestes, by putting on their respective jackets; her more obedient sister, Chrysothemis (Ella Lily Hyland), trembling in the virgin white dress of Iphigenia.
The murder of Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus (Patrick Robinson), consists of blood spat across his face. It is stark and effective on Magda Willi’s ascending staircase set, on which the drama looks like an act of conjuring. An electric heartbeat pumps up the adrenaline in Brendan Aanes’s sound design, without tipping into frenzy. It is all supremely controlled.
If only Andrews had left it at that. Bergman’s film – regarded as the apex of psychological experimentalism on screen – is trickier to pull off on stage. Andrews introduces a screen and a handheld camera, briefly reflecting the audience but mostly showing us Elisabeth in enigmatically silent closeup.
Hoss holds the camera mostly, and the film’s chase across the beach in a fight between the two women is re-enacted as a backstage walk, with handheld camera. It’s now an old trick, beloved of the likes of Ivo van Hove and Jamie Lloyd, which looks hackneyed here.
There is some clever overlay between the two parts, with same props and costumes turning up. But Alma’s monologues seem like witterings against Elisabeth’s silences. Bergman’s film is said to have influenced David Lynch, among others, and the endeavour here ends up like a sixth-form imitation of both.
As a double bill, of sorts, the first is the showcase, not only of its two central performers but the power of performance itself.
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At the National Theatre, London until 10 October
