Review Roundup: ELEKTRA, Starring Brie Larson

Elektra, haunted by her father's assassination, is consumed by grief; a need for survival; and a thirst for vengeance. When her long lost brother Orestes at last returns, she urges him to a savage and terrifying conclusion but at what cost?

Starring Brie Larson, Daniel Fish directs the first major revival in over a decade of Sophokles’ electrifying and timeless play, Elektra, with a translation by poet Anne Carson, at the Duke Of York’s Theatre.

What did the critics think of Larson's West End debut?

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Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: 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.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Elektra speaks into a handheld mic and her lines turn into sudden song, harsh or tender (Larson was briefly a singer herself and once released an album). Notes slide up the scale then career back down into spoken word. Sometimes she uses a voice distortion machine, like a death metal singer, to mimic her mother or express loathing (“howling bitch”). The anger is never shrill or flatly pitched – her delivery captures not only anger but also grief, resembling Hamlet when at her most melancholy. It is a magnetic performance, fearless for a West End debut.

Olivia Rook, London Theatre: Larson nails certain lines, such as the deadpan delivery of “men love a woman with character”, but her detached, reflective performance style makes it difficult to feel a connection with her character. Her voice is deliberately flat, which often jars, particularly when she is reunited with her brother and her reaction is borderline emotionless.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: Restless and glowering, with her cropped hair, jeans and sleeveless t-shirt (bearing the slogan Bikini Kill) this striking Elektra has one foot in the modern era, the other in antiquity, but it feels like a quagmire, the impact subsiding as the short evening drags on. Patrick Vaill’s hangdog, testy Orestes and Greg Hicks’s grimacing, bare-chested Aegisthus seem curiously sidelined even when in full glare. The laurels go to Stockard Channing (Greece is the word…), giving us a Clytemnestra of stately bearing and stirring defensiveness and lending the pivotal mother-daughter battle an urgency, danger and truthfulness. No cathartic pity and terror, all told; just a crying shame.

Tim Bano, The Standard: A nozzle issues pressure jets of black liquid onto the gold robes of the cast, while Larson is a furious teenager in a Bikini Kill t-shirt, her clothing marking her out as different from everyone around her. There’s a blimp in the air, too. Is it the gods? It’s got an arrow painted on it - like Artemis’s arrows?? WHO KNOWS.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: I think the biggest problem for me was ultimately the use of Anne Carson’s poetic but starchy 2001 verse adaptation – there is some mordant wit in there but I’m not convinced the formality of the verse helped the drama even slightly. We get what the characters are feeling, but Carson’s mannered, sculpted lines feel like a barrier to actual emotional nuance. In particular it’s hard to realy understand what Elektra is feeling at the end – which is a problem in a tragedy!

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: You’ll follow the plot, pretty much, without quite knowing why you should care. Worse, in a way, is that Larson is clearly a gifted, authoritative performer. But she is hemmed into a concept that makes her Elektra only a raging bore. You can see what they are aiming for. But does it come off? Nooooooooo!

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Larson, in jeans and a Bikini Kill T-shirt and sporting a buzzcut, is the pale avenger Elektra,  outraged by the murder of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra (Stockard Channing). Part marble-faced zealot, part angry brat, she paces about Jeremy Herbert’s revolving set, which consists of dirty orange plastic chairs and various oddments of tech arranged against a white cyclorama. A dirigible floats above for reasons that never become clear, and Larson snarls her lines into a pair of microphones, her declaiming punctuated by the use of effects pedals, blasts of feedback and the occasional yelping excursion into song. Oh, and spitting – lots and lots of spitting.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Fish keeps the relationships between the characters abstract and distanced. Larson’s Elektra can shout louder than anyone, because she is literally the one with the microphone. But her speech is – presumably deliberately – flat. She sings the word ‘no’ every time she says it, and at one devastating point screams it out loud. Yet even when Patrick Vail’s ghostly Orestes finally returns, in billows of smoke, she barely glances at him. Her face remains a blank.

Alice Saville, The Independent: Larson’s performance doesn’t miss a beat, showing an impressive mastery of a box of tricks borrowed from the slam poetry world: a distorting vocoder to mockingly imitate her mother’s voice, stamps, spits, and a repeated sung-out “No!” punctuating her smooth verses. There’s still something unpersuasive about it, though – a missing outlet for the terrible grief and rage bubbling through her words.

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times: the difficulty with extremity in drama is that, over time, it produces diminishing returns. Elektra is an unyielding character, but here her monomania proves increasingly alienating rather than inviting understanding, feeling or pity. And while there’s sense in trapping us in her head and giving her control of the narrative, it means the other characters, given no microphones, are banished to the sidelines and fight to achieve definition or even to be heard. The play’s narrative and its debate about justice are lost; in one key exchange a character stands upstage, back to the audience, becoming completely inaudible.

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