Review: ELEKTRA, Duke Of York's Theatre

I drool at the list of accolades boasted by the creative team: A MacArthur Fellowship, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, an Academy Award and a Tony. So why is Daniel Fish’s Elektra such a droning dud?

The West End would have you believe that Sophoclean tragedies are like buses, you wait ages for one and then two come at once. Oedipus at the Old Vic and Elektra now pootling into the Duke of York’s Theatre, both contemporary renditions of a canonical text, raring to slice your face up with their contemporary edge and helmed by big name celebrity casting. The latter phenomenon has received a dragging in the press recently. But we might have just reached a new nadir.

Brie Larson, most famous for her outing as superhero Avenger Captain Marvel is up to a different kind of avenging as Elektra, here an angst ridden teenager raging at the world from her bedroom. Female rage against the patriarchal machine is rammed down our throats even though it doesn’t cohere. Eighty static minutes of boiling anger, spewed through drab slabs of monologue, is targeted at Elektra's mother Clytemnestra who killed her husband, Elektra’s father, Agamemnon. 

Why is there a dangling blimp? Why is there a paint canon sporadically spritzing the chorus? Why does Larson wail atonally like a brat-like banshee into a microphone without any momentum to propel her? It took about three minutes for me to realise that it’s not meant to make sense. This is theatre where the #vibe rules supreme.

I’m almost stupefied at the arrogance of the expectation that what are usually the building blocks of good theatre, (silly things like narrative arc and character depth) can be neglected in favour of all energies channelled towards aura conjuring. It’s like sitting in The Ritz only to be served a meagre spoonful and sent off trundling home starving. But lucky you, at least you got to savour the atmosphere.

To its credit it jitters with punkish theatrics. Shaved headed Larson snarls like Johnny Rotten. She staggers across the constantly revolving stage, set starkly lit and stripped all the way to the back wall, as if playing a demented dreamlike gig churning up poet Anne Carson’s fragmented text, although most of her lines could just be AI generated Morrissey lyrics. Maybe it would work as a interlude at the Golden Globes but here it's just dull.

Atmosphere is mere ornamentation unless the emotional dynamics coiled at the heart of the play beat loud and fast from beneath. That they do not, although there’s a flicker of dramatic hope in Greg Hicks’ slithering Aegisthus and Stockard Channing’s Clytemnestra, dripping with waspish verve. A shame they are not enough to redeem this undernourished mess.

Elekta plays at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 12 April

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