ELECTRA. To 9 April.
Manchester
ELECTRA
by Sophocles adapted by Jo Coombes
Royal Exchange Studio To 9 April
Mon-Fri 7pm Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Post-show discussion 7 April 7pm
Runs 1hr 40min No interval
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
boxoffice@royalexchange.co.uk
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 March
One production of a tragedy that isn't all Greek to us.As if Ireland hasn't played enough of a leading role in British drama over the centuries, here's Jo Combes setting her version of Sophocles somewhere near Sligo in the 1940s. The "wild sisters" Electra and Chrissie live with mother Nestra and her lover Aengus in a remote cottage near the breaking waves of a furious ocean.
Though Martin Macdonagh's Leenane Trilogy has set a new standard for physical and psychological torment in such a setting (which the blood-spattered hands here hardly match) there are still elements of Sophocles that leap into clarity.
However unhappy she is with their husband-killing mother and her lover, Chrissy (still wild enough when pleading with her sister) tries to live with reality. Father-idealising Electra is locked inthe intensity of her hatred, facing the threat of incarceration in a Sligo home for 'unfortunate' young women.
Electra will hear no criticism of her father, denying he collaborated with Ireland's oppressor by fighting for the English (an interesting variation on the Trojan War motif). All part, she insists, of a long-term strategy for his country's good.
Penny Layden makes clear this is a woman obsessed, backed up like a scary cat against a tree-trunk as he mother argues centre-stage. She is as elemental as her surrounds, where grass shorn as close as her hair reaches on to arid sand which spills into the audience.
Stella McCusker's fine Nestra provides no home for sympathy either. Clad predominantly in blood-red and black her attempts at reasonable argument are undermined at news her grown-up son, whose vengeful return she'd been dreading, is dead. This sends her into whooping delight, flinging open the cottage's shutters with a loud snap, dancing to radio music with a cruel and lonely version of the dionysiac ecstasy overtaking the sisters in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa.
And Combes creates a female Hamlet-echo (Electra complex meets its Oedipal sibling?) as Nestra kneels and prays at her husband's shrine with its tribute of candles. Behind her stands Electra, hands clasped in a silent prayer of rapid-fire fury. If only she'd a dagger, you feel, she'd do it pat.
The men are good enough, but it's the women who really figure here. And that includes Maggie Shevlin's old nun of a nurse, trying for a moderation she knows is unachievable in a situation that's intolerable but foreseeing the continuing pattern of grief.
This is too particular a version to be among the near-definitive, but it has the virtues of clarity and vivid individuality. Once more, the Exchange Studio shows itself a superbly flexible space, suggesting remoteness and distance. This production is well worth a visit.
Brigid: Maggie Shevlin
Electra: Penny Layden
Chrissy: Amy Huberman
Nestra: Stella McCusker
Restes: William Ash
Aengus: Drew Carter-Cain
Director: Jo Combes
Designer: Becky Hurst
Lighting: Tom 'Dexter' Scott
Sound: Gerry Marsden
Dialects: Mark Langley
2005-03-26 13:09:57