Gate, London
"I found your story very difficult to listen to." So says Electra to Strophius, who has told her of her brother's death. And so say I to director Carrie Cracknell and adapter Nick Payne, who have made of Sophocles' tragedy a punishing 70 minutes in the theatre. The challenge with this shard of grief in dramatic form is to make its maddened heroine, and her fundamentalist take on justice, sympathetic to a post-Athenian audience. This revival falls short. It's an endlessly repeating, one-note demonstration of woe, spite and vengeance, with little purchase on the modern world.
The problem certainly isn't with the committedness of the performances; Cath Whitefield is ferocious as Electra, her face like a knuckle-dustered fist from start almost to finish. I felt more sorry for her than sympathetic to her character, not least as she shrieked and grunted for minutes on end while clawing her way into dead dad Agamemnon's tomb. There she was, scrabbling around at my feet (the audience sit practically on stage), and only modesty prevented me lending a hand, and putting the poor woman out of her misery.
This spectacle might have served to establish how demented by grief Electra is – but that point has been made, and continues to be, throughout the show. There's no insight into bereavement here, and little light to leaven the dark shadows. A flicker of humour 10 minutes from the end is the only acknowledgment that tragedy needs more than anguish to thrive. "Later on, you can smile as much as you want," Orestes promises Electra – and I thought: can I watch that play, please?
Nor – unless you think there's anything to recommend the eye-for-an-eye school of jurisprudence – is there much of a moral dilemma to engage with. The production has its strengths – its stygian atmosphere, dispelled by pools of light; Cracknell's ability to marshal intense performances from her six-strong cast. But it's evocation of grief is too aggressive. Watching Electra's pain becomes, alas, a fairly painful experience.