ELECTRA. To 22 November.
London
ELECTRA
by Jean Giraudoux translated by Winifred Smith
Gate Theatre To 15 November 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 50min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 November
Silk purse production of sow's ear drama.Ancient Greek myths hold their force in the conflict between barbarity and morality; the tragedies by the dialectic between values and power, reason and emotion. (And performing up to 5 plays a day made for script concision.) When, in 1930s France, Jean Giraudoux expanded Electra's story to almost 3 hours, however elegantly and wittily, and embroidered the story with an Antigone-like contrast between moral urgency and expedient rule, he lost the original's remorseless logic and inevitability.
The contained intensity of Erica Whyman's production partially restores this, while controlling the potentially ceaseless verbal whimsies - recalling Christopher Fry's verse dramas at their least purposeful - in which Giraudoux indulges.
The long, narrow space in which a single audience row sits, caged by the skeletal set, makes for an imprisoned feel, the couple of small ponds (besides requiring nifty footwork as actors trample the small space) giving a suggestion of calm which has now been overturned.
Joanna McCallum's Clytemnstra, a society lady with a confident explanation for everything and a commanding way of shrugging away opposition, comes closest to what Giraudoux probably imagined. Lucy Briers' Electra probably doesn't. But to see this initially sullen creature, her face and mind turned in on herself, develop the ruthless intensity of someone on the brink of revenge, is to understand the years of suffering and futility.
Briers' intensity lives on a different level from the pleading practicality of Charlie Roe's ruler. And from the dignified comic turn of Malcolm Ridley, passively bringing flowers to the woman Aegisthus has ordered him to marry.
Whyman presents the incipient Furies, who will dog revenger Orestes (clean-cut Ben Silverstone, clearly treading an option-free path), as giggly, insinuating children with underlying menace, maturing quickly cheeks losing their childish red shine into fiercesome commentators. With Grant Gillespie's laconic, striped-blazer sporting observer clearly not your average beggar, and a mix of humour from Paul Cawley's functionary and wistfulness from Josephine Myddelton as his initially-oppressed wife, there's a strong cast. They're helped by the ducking and weaving choreography of Whyman's production, that counters the density and gives some sense of tragic action.
Fury: Cora Bisset
Electra: Lucy Briers
President of the Council: Paul Cawley
Beggar: Grant Gillespie
Clytemnestra: Joanna McCallum
Agatha: Josephine Myddelton
Fury: Rebecca Peyton
Fury: Cordelia Rayner
Gardener: Malcolm Ridley
Aegisthus: Charlie Roe
Orestes: Ben Silverstone
Manservant: James Thorne
Director: Erica Whyman
Designer: Soutra Gilmour
Lighting: Anna Watson
Sound: Michael Oliva
Assistant director: Tom Cornford
2003-11-06 01:16:11