Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✭✩
by Jean Giraudoux, directed Leon Rubin
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
June 28-August 30, 2003
"Comedy Blooms into Tragedy"
Rather than following Aeschylus's "Agamemnon" with the other two plays of his trilogy, the "Oresteia", Stratford has decided to replace what would be the next play, "The Libation Bearers", with Jean Giraudoux's "Electra" of 1937. Both plays depict Electra and her brother Orestes taking revenge on their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for the murder of their father Agamemnon. Giraudoux's "Electra" is a delightful and thought-provoking play in its own right. But seeing it immediately after "Agamemnon" will throw most people for a loop.
Giraudoux's play requires that we forget some of the most powerful moments in Aeschylus. "Agamemnon" concludes with Clytemnestra boasting to the populace of Argos that she has killed their king and with Aegisthus pledging to repress any resistance to his rule. In Giraudoux, the populace including Electra herself, believe the lie spread by Clytemnestra that Agamemnon slipped when going to his bath and accidentally fell on his sword. Although she lives in the same palace with them, Electra somehow also does not know that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are lovers. Considered on its own, Giraudoux's premise seems unlikely, except that it makes his overall scheme for the action possible.
The point Giraudoux seeks to demonstrate with "Electra" is explained by the Gardener: "In nature everything becomes what it truly is". Biology and evolution take the place of fate. Electra has been living an unexamined life, instinctively hating her mother but not knowing why. Only when her brother Orestes appears does she begin to look actively for answers about what really happened in the past. The more she learns the clearer it becomes that her role and Orestes will be to wreak revenge. By the end her decision is made more difficult since Argos is under siege from Corinth and demanding the deaths of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra will also entail the fall of Argos.
Giraudoux's notion of growth as fate is reflected in his concept of the Eumenides or Furies, external embodiments of a guilty conscience. When we first meet them the three are mischievous six-year-old schoolgirls. As Electra's knowledge of the past increases, they age until by the end they are attractive adult women. In addition to the Eumenides, Giraudoux provides another, more Brechtian chorus in the form of a beggar who, as often happens in Greek myth, may also be a god. He knows the story and its eventual outcome and sits in the audience with us as an ironic commentator on the action.
Giraudoux's concept also affects the genre of the play. The first act is quite clearly a comedy. The main difficulty is not revenge and murder but Electra's forthcoming marriage to the gardener. The main battle she has with her mother is whether Clytemnestra did or did not intentionally drop Orestes as a child. The comedy is reinforced by a subplot dealing with an elderly judge and his flirtatious young wife Agatha. But as the characters and the drama itself grow to be the tragedy it truly is, comedy drains out of the action.
This fascinating play receives a delightful production. Lorenzo Savoini's set from "Agamemnon" has cracked further and is bound in red bunting, suggesting perhaps the blood of the House of Atreus has seen. The stage and auditorium is decorated as a garden underscoring the theme of natural growth. Sarah Armstrong's costumes reflecting French styles in the 1930s are a visual treat, especially her sequence of storybook-like matching outfits for the Eumenides. Wendy Greenwood's lighting is always attentive to the work's progressively changing mood. Leon Rubin directs with wit and economy, a refreshing change from some of the excesses of "Henry VI" last year or "Pericles in this.
Rubin has drawn fine performances from nearly all the cast. The principal exception is Sarah Dodd in the title role. While all the others seem to relish the fantasy of the play, Dodd's delivery is flat and her acting unanimated, preventing the production from being the complete artistic success it could have been.
Fortunately, the rest of the cast catches the right mood. Dion Johnstone makes a dashing and sensitive Orestes. Rami Posner captures the self-deprecating humour of Electra's would-be fiancé, the Gardener. Walter Borden and Sara Topham are suitably more exaggerated as the two imports from French farce, the irascible Judge and the vivacious Agatha. Sean Arbuckle is excellent at maintaining the ambiguity of the mysterious Beggar whose imperturbability and wry comments on the action may suggest a more-than-human knowledge.
Karen Robinson and Scott Wentworth reprise the roles of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus they played in "Agamemnon", even though Giraudoux's version of these characters is very different. Robinson aptly finds the comedy in this fussy, willfully forgetful woman, far removed from Aeschylus' imperious, bloodthirsty queen. Wentworth is not Aeschylus' boastful tyrant, but an efficient ruler whose insistence on order hides the guilt that has clearly ravaged him.
Julia Donovan, Randi Helmers and Julie Tepperman are a continual pleasure as the three Eumenides, precise in choral speaking, clear in capturing each shift in age and hilarious in their pert gestures and delivery.
This production reveals such vitality in Giraudoux that one hopes for more revivals of his work. "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place" would have been good parallel programming for the Festival's upcoming "Troilus and Cressida". Despite a disappointment in the title role, this is overall the most successful production in Stratford's "House of Atreus" series and, in thought and mirth, the most entertaining.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sarah Dodd. ©2010 MacKenzieRo.
2003-07-19
Electra