Electra/Persona

This play starts with what initally appears to be a game of chance as Cate Blanchett or Nina Hoss get to choose on the flip of a coin which of them will play Electra/Elisabeth.  On the night I attended, Nina Hoss was Electra and Cate Blanchett was Clytemnestra/Alma.  I really enjoyed the first half,  which takes us through a mother/daughter battle, as Electra tries to understand the horrendous thing her mother has done.  On a bare stage, with just steps, the performances of both leads were excellent , and I really  enjoyed the interplay between the two leads.  Violent and vibrant, this had me on the edge of my seat, and not just because I had someone with a big head in front of me as always.  There's no interval, so we get a few minutes of visible set change and character resets as the two leads transform into their roles  for Persona, in the second half of the play, something, which now I think about it, makes a lot of sense as we are going to dig into character, and what makes one person distinct from another.

For the second half of the play we follow Elisabeth (Hoss) an actress who has chosen to become mute after walking offstage from a performance of Electra, taking a retreat with Alma (Blanchett) , her nurse and companion..  The two of them spend their days together, Alma talking and Elisabeth silent but reacting, which we see close up, using a hand held camera, projected in huge scale onto a screen which dominates the stage.  I found the second half a lot more difficult to understand, as the two women merge into one personality, then back again whilst we hear about Alma's different experiences of being a woman, and not being a mother.   The tossing of a coin at the beginning to decide who was who as if they were interchangeable suddenly made a lot more sense.  I loved the look of it, like a ballet or poetry in motion,with deliberate and precise movements against the starkness of the stage.  

So what’s it about?  Well basically about mothers and daughters I think, womanhood in general a bit, grief and loss, and how to move forward, but talking about it later we realised there are lots of other theories - it's that sort of play, where you could assign all sorts of meaning, depending on the angle you are coming from.

I haven’t mentioned the two secondary characters yet - Chrysothemis/Anna played by Ella Lily Hyland, who is the younger sister of Electra, but plays Anna, and largely a narrative role in Persona.  And Patrick Robinson who has a brief appearance as Aeghistus in the first half and just Husband in the second.  I love the fact that he doesn't have a name, and men really are secondary to what is happening with the women, even though they are arguably the cause of the issues that the women are dealing with.

I thought the performances of both leads were great - I’d love to see the leads swapped around to see if it was different. And I loved the experience of it all even if the meaning was sometimes a bit oblique!  Worth it to see performances at the top of their game.   The first half grabbed me emotionally, but the second half felt like more of an intellectual puzzle.  

Earlier in the day we had been to see the film Elsinore at my first visit to the London Film Festival this year.  I’ve still got my notes to write up, but I think I 'enjoyed' this so much it may have influenced how I felt about the play later.  The film scratched all sorts of itches in my brain, being built around a specific production of Hamlet which featured Ian Charleson who was dying, but determined to play the Dane on this stage.   A devastating, passionate declaration of the importance of art, particularly the theatre, but also about living life to the full and with joy, entwined with the terrible Aids crisis and the systemic homophobia of the 1980s.  Such a waste of so many lives.   Great performance from Andrew Scott of course, and it is his film, but also fantastic support from Olivia Coleman and Billie Piper.  Loved it!