Elektra in the West End is haunting, punchily feminist and perverse

Independent

06-02-2025

Don't be fooled by the presence of shaven-headed Captain Marvel star Brie Larson in a Bikini Kill band t-shirt – this dream-like staging of Sophocles's Elektra is closer to the spirit of ancient drama than anything else you'll find in the West End's current spate of Greek plays. In true classical style, the action takes place offstage, chanting floods the air, and a round revolving stage mimics a stone amphitheatre. It's haunting, punchily feminist and perverse, all at once.
Director Daniel Fish's last West End outing saw him needling at fans of traditional musical theatre with his intriguingly weird, post-dramatic take on Oklahoma!. The same determined spirit of non-naturalism is here, too, but Anne Carson's terse poetic translation of Sophocles is substantially harder to follow than a golden-age musical, its words falling in flattened tones across surreal scenes. The weight of the play rests heavily on Larson's shoulders: she laments and rages her way through the story with impressive deftness, echoed by a chorus of six women draped in gleaming folds of satin, delivering their verse in a beguiling, otherworldly plainsong.
Her Elektra is a punky rebel, bent on revenge against a family that's stifling her. 'You are some sort of punishment cage locked around my life,' she tells her unrepentantly villainous mother Clytemnestra – played by Stockard Channing with the camp poise of a New York lady-who-lunches, tricked out in a white fur coat stained with symbolic black ink. This matriarch murdered her husband, and Elektra's sister Chrysothemis (Marieme Diouf) is standing by her, so it's up to brother Orestes (Patrick Vaill) to dole out vengeance.
Larson's performance doesn't miss a beat, showing an impressive mastery of a box of tricks borrowed from the slam poetry world: a distorting vocoder to mockingly imitate her mother's voice, stamps, spits, and a repeated sung-out 'No!' punctuating her smooth verses. There's still something unpersuasive about it, though – a missing outlet for the terrible grief and rage bubbling through her words.
Perhaps that's because although Elektra is a character that's fascinated modern readers with her unfeminine fury, she's also bound up in ancient values. This proto-feminist must still live like a servant in her mother's house and wait for her brother to do her dirty work: all talk, no action. Fish acknowledges this tension by keeping the play's men Orestes and late arrival Aegisthus (Greg Hicks) lingering unobtrusively at the back of the stage – as Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna famously shouted at a gig, 'All girls to the front!' But this decision means that the later, more bloodthirsty scenes fall flat, even though they're supplemented by the recorded voice of a news reporter describing a more contemporary atrocity.
Where Brie Larson's screen roles are all action, this staging is full of a mesmerising but near-stagnant stillness. It's an opportunity for her to show (like any number of Hollywood stars recently) that she's not sold her soul to the movie industry's shadowy overlords – without fully demonstrating that she's got a talent that demands to be seen live, either. And it's a chance for Fish to explore urgent questions of action versus inaction, and why we stay silent in the face of atrocity – but in a way that's too oblique to feel fully topical. It's a fascinating experiment, one that's beautiful, but ultimately impenetrable.