Blanchett and Nina Hoss, who appeared together in the acclaimed film Tar, take on the roles of Electra and her mother Clytemnestra in this ambitious but laboured production.
Each night, an audience member is invited to flip a coin to decide which actress plays which role, borrowing a trick from Danny Boyle’s celebrated 2011 production of Frankenstein.
In that production, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated between playing the doctor and the monster, a device that generated genuine theatrical electricity.
Here, the result on the night reviewed was tails, meaning Blanchett took the role of Electra and Hoss that of Clytemnestra, the mother who murdered her husband in his bathtub.
The production unfolds on a vast, stark stage dominated entirely by a vertiginous flight of stairs, which generates more anxiety about twisted ankles than genuine dramatic tension.
The first act retells the ancient story of Electra and Clytemnestra, running in thematic parallel to the events explored in Christopher Nolan’s record-breaking box-office film The Odyssey.
Electra seethes over her mother’s murder of her father Agamemnon, while Clytemnestra nurses her own grievance over Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter in exchange for favourable winds to Troy.
The two women bicker, reconcile, and force each other to relive the murders of loved ones, yet the exchanges remain, strangely, almost entirely without dramatic charge or momentum.
Blanchett brings a sinewy, feline magnetism to her performance, but even her formidable star power cannot fully illuminate these dense and abstract exchanges.
The title signals that this is not simply a retelling of Electra but also a reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, in which an actress playing a Greek princess suffers a breakdown and falls silent mid-performance.
Blanchett accordingly transforms into the mute actress Elisabet Vogler, with Hoss assuming the role of her talkative nurse, as live video is introduced via a large screen lowered onto the stage.
The screen carries high-definition black and white footage of Blanchett’s face in extreme close-up, beneath a fur coat, on a beach, beside a campfire, in what amounts to an extended portrait of a single face.
The production does achieve moments of genuine visual artistry, with dry-ice clouds hanging suspended in the air and smoke tumbling down the stairs like a slow-motion river.
During the murder of Aegisthus, Electra spits viscous, blood-red liquid over him in a moment of visceral, committed theatricality that briefly jolts the audience into attention.
The second act captures something of the surreal, dreamlike quality of Bergman’s masterpiece, though only partially and inconsistently, leaving the overall experience feeling frustratingly incomplete.
The central question the production never quite answers is what exactly this strange combination of ancient Greek tragedy and modernist European cinema is actually trying to say.
Whether it argues that women are still pitted against one another in a patriarchal society, or that grief spans millennia, remains genuinely unclear by the time the curtain falls.
Electra/Persona is ultimately a long and plodding journey without a clear destination, and it is telling that the coin flip at the start drew louder applause than the final bow.