"Electra": The Journey (Continues)

The course of Electra has been many things, we’ve explored the challenging aspects, the historical aspects and it must be said the slightly wilder aspects.  Approaching Greek text was strange at first, something I hadn’t encountered before with regards to acting. It was necessary for us to go above and beyond with this text in order to find what was at its root and core. It was different to what we were all used to performing, more heightened, more stylized so it evidently required intense examination. 

Personally I found my journey with this text a liberating one. Classical text is something I had little experience with and being giving the opportunity to work as an ensemble and discover this text as a group was extremely rewarding. There was a certain consciousness and self-judgment you had to loose with this tragedy. You can only fight a text like this to a certain extent before you succumb to the languages textures and the stylized movements.

The more you committed yourself to this world, to these characters reasoning and beliefs, the better understanding you acquired and the deeper you were able to delve into the essence of the play. Beginning with viewpoints exercises was brilliant. It helped us to release our inhibitions and free ourselves from the confines of our minds. It also helped us to loose some of the anticipated nervousness we had approaching a production of this scale and also helped to get to know each other better. There’s a certain extent you want to be comfortable with someone before you start groping their face and randomly holding their hand on stage. But sure, when in Greece. 

The interesting thing about Electra is that there was something new to discover every week. A new inflection, a new staging, a new nuance in a relationship, our Eureka moments were endless. We managed to keep the show fresh, to bring our wide plethora of ideas together and expand them under the intuitive guidance of our wonderful dramaturge Natasha. 
We were directed to find our own personal relationship in the text, to bring together the nuances of our characters and to learn the tools in which one must draw upon to develop another persona.

As expected production week was, of course, a rollercoaster ride.  There is always a point in a show where you start wanting your props and stage, you’re craving to take the play to the next level. Suddenly the show becomes new and experimental all over again. There are things you realize you never noticed before, inflections that unexpectedly work better and relationships that become more defined. But it’s bringing it to an audience that is always the best bit. The adrenaline and excitement that comes with your first performance is always unforgettable. Your heart is in your mouth, you’re rooting for your cast members and mentally preparing yourself to be ready is the most important thing in the world.

Being a character that was on stage for the majority of the performance was both insightful and challenging. Under careful direction we learned how to control and expel our energy for that amount of time with out dialogue and along with that we got to see first hand the different nuances of the show each night.

Niamh Ryan (center) with Jessica Watts and Emily Noctor
Photo: Natasha Remoundou

              A film is something that can capture a moment and relate the same moment again and again each time. In theatre, once a moment happens it is somewhat lost forever but that is merely where the preponderance of the excitement lies. You can connect with your audience, invite them into your world, include them in your experience and every night something new is found. No show is the same, each night upon watching the rest of the cast there was a new impetus found in the text, a facial expression or inflection that added even more depth to the performance.

We were a very lucky cast in regards to the environment we were given the opportunity to work in. Theatre rehearsals are often long, stressful, wrinkle creating and social life destroying but Electra had a little more. We all pulled together as a team and there was an imminent sense of support and comradery through out the production. There was never a dull moment in Electra. Each of us had the freedom to be ourselves and learn in a comfortable and encouraging environment. Sometimes all the confidence you need is in a Katy Perry jam. Overall, Electra was a thoroughly enjoyable show and luckily, we’ll have the chance to do it all over again next week.  

Niamh Ryan

The Chorus cheers on the murder of Clytemnestra.
Photo: Natasha Remoundou

***

Sophocles' Electra in an adaptation by Frank McGuinness

Directed by Charlotte McIvor

RETURNS due to popular demand

Wednesday, March 19 and Thursday, March 20 at 8PM

Bailey Allen Hall

Tickets ON SALE now at the Socs Box. 

Call 091 492852 to confirm availability.

"Electra" performs for two more nights on Wednesday, March 19 and Thursday, March 20 at 8PM in Bailey Allen Hall, Aras Na Macleinn

The Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance in association with Student Societies announces that:

Sophocles' Electra in an adaptation by Frank McGuinness

Directed by Charlotte McIvor 

RETURNS due to popular demand

Wednesday, March 19 and Thursday, March 20 at 8PM

Bailey Allen Hall, Aras na Macleinn

Tickets ON SALE now at the Socs Box.  Call 091 492852 to confirm availability. 

Spread the word and get your tickets!

More information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/200030413539641/?fref=ts

Annie Clery as Electra with Laura Webb, Emily Noctor, Samira Barar, Niamh Ryan and Jessica Watts as Chorus

Photo: Natasha Remoundou

Mourning becomes Revenge: About Electra

Natasha Remoundou-Howley

About Electra

“How could we, too, have found a way to stay independent in the wonderful

joy of indifference and tolerance, away from everything, inside of everything, inside of ourselves,—alone, united, unbound, without comparisons, antagonisms, criticism, without being measured by the expectations and claims of others.

Yiannis Ritsos, Orestes (Fourth Dimension), 1966.

“In the century of Orestes and Electra that is upon us, Oedipus will seem a comedy.”

Heiner Müller.

In Yiannis Ritsos’ poem “Orestes” written in 1966, a year before the military coup in Athens,  Orestes delivers a long dramatic monologue in which he interrogates the very essence of the autonomy of the tragic hero. The ferocious saga of the Atreides, the dysfanctional family line that gave us Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Orestes, and Electra, finds nowhere a more fertile ground to expose the conflicts that arise between autonomy and social action than in Sophocles’ narrative, and no other play in the tragic corpus has divided academics, artists, and critics than his Electra. Holding  a privileged position on the modern Greek and international stage, Electra has been performed since the 18th century in the original, in translation and in adaptation. Most of these productions have been major artistic events, as the play’s reception history indicates, highlighting the wide diversity and complex interconnections between different theatrical traditions, performance styles and scenic vocabularies. Revived at crucial historical junctures, the play is preoccupied with time and history, the personal and the collective, conflict, guilt and revenge, violence and justice, scrutinizing simultaneously subjectivity, responsibility and the possibility of catharsis from matricide, for the central hero is a vengeful daughter.

Athens uprising: Greek students leading the resistance to the Colonels Junta in 1973 in Athens.

Électre by Antoine Vitez, Théâtre des Amandiers, 1971 (set design Yiannis Kokkos). The French director and translator returned not once but three times to Sophocles' Electra with actress Evelin Istria always in the role of Electra in 1966, 1971, and 1986. Following the first ritualistic production of 1966, Vitez staged his play again in the aftermath of the events of May 1968 in Paris. For this production he chose lines from Yiannis Ritsos' poetry collection Parenthesis (Fourth Dimension) alluding to the plight of the Greek period against the dictatorship (1968-1973).

The pervasiveness of the 20^th Freudian century’s influence with its wars, revolutions, its historical traumas and apprehensions but also, before that, the performance reception of Electra from the Neoclassical era to the New Millennium, galvanized very conflicting engagements with the tragic heroine: from Ben Johnson’s (1604), Crébillon’s (1708), Brumoy’s (1730), Voltaire’s  (1750), Alfieri’s (1783), Schlegel’s (1803), Jeanin’s (1821), Soume’s (1822), and Bayley’s (1825) idealized and idolized statuesque Grecian daughter as a figure of resistance against the oppressor to the catalytic impact of the Hofmannsthal/Reindhardt hysteric and ecstatic Elektra (1903) that informs all subsequent productions of the play, the list counts a new wave of figurations of Electra. 

Ben Johnson employed the myth of Electra in an essay he wrote to celebrate Jacob A's ascension to monarchic power in 1604. 

Crébillon's Electra in 1708 refigured the heroine as a passionate but tamed advocate of the duty towards to family that supresses her erotic feelings for Aegisthus' son Itis. 

In his 1730 treatise Le Théâtre des Grecs, Pierre Brumoy, radically altered the scene of 

     the agon between Clytaemnestra and Electra as he considered it too brutal.

The famous French actress Mme.Clairon playing Electra holding the ashes of her brother Orestes in Voltaire's Orestes (1750)

                    The English actress Mary Ann Yates impersonating Electra in 1977.

    The theoritician of German Romanticism A.W.Schlegel dealt Electra head on, transforming Sophocles' tragedy of horror into a parable of the exemplary suffering hero par' excellence: unlike the French classicists of the Neoclassical era, he did not work on an adaptation but chose to directly translate the source text. Inspired by the noble suffering of the  tragic subject, Schlegel's 1803 Electra became the symbol of his "eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Grosse" (noble simplicity and moral greatness).

The Electras that haunt most of the post-1903 productions of the Sophoclean play, owe a great deal to the Hofmannsthal/Reindhardt Elektra and her pathological obsession, the vain energy, the fierce, uncompromising mania of the female mourner and avenger. Physically torn and mentally shattered, steeped into a perseverant frenetic hatred rather than a royal desperation and sadness, dark, ugly, exhausted, spectacularly sick, Electra whose name means “without a bed” electrifies the modern stage like no other. 

 Hugo von Hofmannsthal's production of Elektra directed by Karl Reindhardt (Kleines Theater, Berlin, 1903) brought about a revolution in the way Electra was represented on stage and in the text. 

A hysterical diva: the 1903 Hofmannsthal/Reindhardt Elektra became a libretto for the opera by Richard Strauss in 1909. In the photo, Annie Crowl, Dresden Opera, 1909.

The dialogue that opens up between the myth of the Atreides and modernity is equally impressive. The fin de siècle may well be termed “the century of Electra,” overshadowing even Oedipus in its darkness and despair. The Sophoclean Electra might not have enjoyed the rich stage and philosophical career that Antigone and Oedipus have, however, the 20^th Oedipal century saw the resurgence of an interest in Electra, the female psyche, as what Bernard Knox calls the most “self-analytical” of tragic heroes, and the Sophoclean play as an astute study and intense examination into the “psychopathology of revenge” (E.Hall). Works like the ones by O’Neill (1929-31), Dylan Thomas (1933), Edward and Christine Longford (1935), MacNeice (1936), Girodoux (1937), Eliot (1939), Sartre (1943), Yioursenar (1944), Howptman (1947), Streller (1951), Sylvia Plath (1957), Vitez (1966), Ronconi (1972), Tom Murphy (1975), Peter Stein (1980), Peter Hall, Tadassi Suzuki, Tom Paulin (1990), the Warner/Shaw production (1992), Sarah Kane, Seamus Heaney (1996), Marinna Carr (2002), Simon Doyle (2010) and Frank McGuinness (1997), open up new perspectives on the idea of the tragic experience.  Looking at the sinuous aesthetic and ideological trajectory of productions of Electra since the 20^th century, one can only anticipate in the century of Electra and Orestes not just new figures and texts, but new figurations, fissures, gaps, lacunae that Electra’s tragedy unveils: fissures of narrative, of the tragic, fissures of the psyche. 

Eirini Papa as Euripides' Electra is Michalis Cacoyiannis' 1962 film. 

Zoe Wanamaker in Frank McGuinness's Electra, 1997.  

Stefania Goulioti playing Sophocles' Electra, directed by Peter Stein. 
Epidaurus, Greece, 2007.