A proposition that intrigues and entices on so many levels — premise, sources, director, stars — lives up to its promise, and then some. Electra/Persona is bold, dazzling, challenging for both actors and audience. And in Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, it confirms an acting partnership that needs to be teased and tested again and again.
Rather than affectation, the title can be taken literally: writer and director Benedict Andrews (who directed Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire in both London and New York) is offering potted riffs on Sophocles and Bergman, Greek tragedy and modern cinematic psychodrama. He has said in interviews that the evening is not a double-bill, but “one hinged work”; either way, it’s two roughly one-hour acts, with a short intermission. The join, of course, is that it is while performing as Electra on stage that the fictional actress in Persona (played on screen by Liv Ullmann) stops speaking completely, prompting the action of the film.
The result here is a form of investigation, mining for similarities, or resonances, between play and film, the characters and their dynamics. Bergman’s scenario famously reaches the deeply ambiguous point at which the personalities of the actress Elisabet Vogler and her nurse, Alma, seem to merge. Andrews extends the conceit to Electra and her mother Clytemnestra, underlining the fact that they have far more in common with each other than they think. At the same time, guilt and confusion, particularly over a woman’s lack of feeling for her child, pass in waves between the two pieces.
