The hottest ticket in theatreland will soon be Cate Blanchett in Electra/Persona. Caged female rage continues to capture audiences
It feels like a very Greek summer here in the UK?. The ground is scorched, it last rained months ago, and the giant publicity machine for Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar-grossing The Odyssey – from red-carpet frocks to professorial disapproval – is a Charybdis, swallowing all other cultural events in its gaping maw. Mere Mortals – San Francisco Ballet’s astonishing work inspired by the story of Pandora – runs in Edinburgh this month before going to Sadler’s Wells in September. And Greek tragedy continues to fill London’s theatres.
Last week, I went to see Simon Stone’s reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Bridge theatre in south London, and it was packed. Even on a Thursday afternoon, there was a huge audience for the story of a family who turn on one another, wreaking intergenerational violence until their whole house lies in tatters and madness. Partly that is because of the excellent cast: David Morrissey and Mary-Louise Parker play Christopher and Montie – a modern Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, their marital squabbles fizzing back and forth until he cracks and she snaps. Their children are the ones who will have to try to reconcile the impossible: duty to their murdered father, respect to their murderous mother.
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