Written for Culture Wars
Slow, smooth and silent, bar the creaking stage underneath, five men in wheelchairs roll onstage and form a procession, at once funereal and military. They stamp and spin, before turning their heads out to the audience and chuckling clownishly.
Tadashi Suzuki’s hospital-bound take on Electra confines every character to a wheelchair. Electra sits still and fixed, her legs folded beneath her, waiting for her brother Orestes to return and avenge their father’s murder. Clythemnestra stands upright on hers, dragged onstage by a nurse like Boudicca in her chariot, possibly a visual reference to Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.
To my mind, like Godot, Suzuki’s Orestes never comes. His death is announced before his arrival and when he comes he’s not the man we expect: much older than his mother, wrinkled and hunched. Could he be a figment of Electra’s imagination, constructed to enable her to do the deed herself? Could it all be fantasies whirring around a frazzled mind? “Dreams,” says Clythemnestra of her own recurring nightmares, “are to blame for everything.”
Suzuki’s staging is almost a concert recital of the play – using a whittled down version by Hugo von Hofmannsthal first seen in 1903 in which Electra is “an obsessional neurotic. The action is dead still. Text is percussively declaimed. It should be boring but it’s not: the whole is too absolutely focused – coiled-tight as if ready to spring – for that; the institutional imagery too stark and pristine.
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