Elektra review – Brie Larson makes a fearless West End debut in punk tragedy
‘There’s nothing more dangerous to a warrior than emotion,” Jude Law’s Kree commander tells Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel in the film that secured her Hollywood breakthrough. Anger, he says, “only serves the enemy”.
Larson’s ancient-but-modern avenger Elektra, not an intergalactic warrior but a punk rock rebel, is nothing if not angry over the murder of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Emotion burns off her but serves her vengeance well enough. She looks androgynous and off-kilter with a buzz cut and a Bikini Kill T-shirt.
Directed by Daniel Fish, who radically adapted Oklahoma! at the Young Vic in 2022, this arresting production is similarly overhauled. Part spoken, part sung through in recitative and partly shouted in fury, this is a lyrical, avant garde creation, like a long lamentation, bare in its staging and emotions.
Elektra speaks into a handheld mic and her lines turn into sudden song, harsh or tender (Larson was briefly a singer herself and once released an album). Notes slide up the scale then career back down into spoken word. Sometimes she uses a voice distortion machine, like a death metal singer, to mimic her mother or express loathing (“howling bitch”). The anger is never shrill or flatly pitched – her delivery captures not only anger but also grief, resembling Hamlet when at her most melancholy. It is a magnetic performance, fearless for a West End debut.
Sound is key to this version of the ancient Greek revenge drama by Sophokles (the production restores the “k” for both the protagonist and writer). Translated by Canadian poet Anne Carson, with crystalline verse, it is filled with ritual stomps, bangs and funereal keening. Sound is Elektra’s weapon too, assaulting the ears. Told she is the weaker sex, her voice is mobilised in protest: “No” is an elongated, rising note she returns to in her dissonant assertion of power.
But words are also harmonious in the mouths of the all-female, six-strong chorus (are they band members?). Musicality predominates, accentuating the sense of a sung-through ancient Greek chorus, the text set to composer Ted Hearne’s music. Jeremy Herbert’s set design is a plain arrangement of shadows and sound equipment, some of it overhead, with the stage forever in revolve. It has the effect of a gig gone awry.
Elektra’s family clashes are fuelled by a complex dynamic in which no character comes off as plainly villainous or virtuous. Stockard Channing is imperious and desultory as Clytemnestra, like a bored Upper East Side mother. But she defends herself against her daughter’s accusations with reasoned argument, reminding her of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, and momentarily making Larson look like a brattish high-schooler.
A fight with Elektra’s sister, Chrysothemis (Marième Diouf), whom she charges with cowardice, is overlain with the strains of Beyoncé’s Daddy Lessons, which gets louder until the dialogue is drowned out – as if taking place in an angry teenager’s bedroom.
Violence remains off stage but is insinuated with a device in which a modern-day massacre is described through reportage. This works, but there are some more mystifying or achingly cool elements: a blimp dangling over the stage, out of keeping with the rest of the imagery; a smoke machine that exhales swirling plumes as Elektra’s returning brother, Orestes (Patrick Vaill), prepares to kill his mother.
Related: Electra-fying! Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson brings back an ancient avenger
So much good eclipses the oddities, though, and there is passing humour, too, including wry asides from Larson and the sight of Orestes, in disguise, speaking of the doomed chariot race dressed in a Formula One boiler suit. His role seems deliberately abbreviated, as if to underline the fact that this is a play about women, power and patriarchy.
In that there is an oblique lesson for our times on individual responsibility in a time of corruption. Do you bend to toxic power, like Chrysothemis, or enact violence against violence? If the latter, what is the personal cost of this? The lights go down with this question hovering.
It is a penetrating production, lean, charged and fresh with a concentrated central performance: celebrity casting, for a change, more than pays off. Larson shines, dangerously.
• At Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 12 April
