Electra

by Tom McGrath

Modern adaptation of the play Electra. 's a dramatist, Tom McGrath’s great strength is to pare things down to the fewest possible words, the sparsest settings, only the most elemental action. His extraordinary stroke with Electra is to seize on the brevities of Greek tragedy and whittle them down even further. The a lethal little piece, bristling with menacing meanings and consequences, representing a total minefield. We watch in horror as the characters blunder through it. His Electra is self-righteously correct, mad and disastrous. His Orestes, rather than god-enlightened, is a hesitant teenager blinded by a vision of new beginnings. All the characters have a dubious mixture of self-deluding, self- interested and high-minded motives. All are fatally credulous, believing messengers and messages even less reliably credentialed than CNN, Fox or the BBC. This piece zings with more compressed meaning than many ten times its length. It resonates powerfully for all of us watching similar stories unfolding in the Middle East, Congo, Rwanda, the USA and Northern Ireland.’ Bob Tait, theatre reviewer and literary critic

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really spare version of Electra, but one that does a lot to directly complicate the ethics of the Hellenic story. In the introduction to this version, McGrath says that he was concerned about the apparent acceptance from all involved that Electra would seek revenge--he couldn't resolve to accept that this was an okay ethical position. Instead, he says, he wanted the guiding principle of this adaptation to be that violence is cyclical and one violent act leads to another (as of course it does in the Electra story, after which Orestes is pursued by the vengeful Furies). The main thing that strikes me about McGrath's version of this play is that Electra is more disturbing in this version that the way I read her in the Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides versions of the play. McGrath's Electra is more akin to Antigone with her fanatical devotion to death, violence, and revenge as ethical goods--to the point where Electra even rejects the hope that Orestes is alive, despite her sister Chrysothemis' assertion that he still lives, so that she can more fully embrace despair and sink further into dejection. It strikes me more in this version how selfish and limited Electra's worldview is, encompassing nothing but the hope that her brother will return and kill her mother and Aegisthus. While Clytemnestra is not great, McGrath makes it hard--rightly, I feel--to accept Electra's as an admirable position.