Natasha Remoundou‐Howley

About Electra

“How could we, too, have found a way to stay independent in the wonderful
joy of indifference and tolerance, away from everything, inside of everything, inside
of ourselves,—alone, united, unbound, without comparisons, antagonisms, criticism,
without being measured by the expectations and claims of others.
Yiannis Ritsos, Orestes (Fourth Dimension), 1966.

“In the century of Orestes and Electra that is upon us, Oedipus will seem a comedy.”
Heiner Müller.

In Yiannis Ritsos’ poem “Orestes” written in 1966, a year before the military coup in
Athens, Orestes delivers a long dramatic monologue in which he interrogates the very
essence of the autonomy of the tragic hero. The ferocious saga of the Atreides, the
dysfunctional kin line that gave us Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides,
Orestes, and Electra, finds nowhere a more fertile ground to expose the conflicts that
arise between autonomy and social action than in Sophocles’ narrative, and no other
play in the tragic corpus has divided academics, artists, and critics more than his Electra.
Holding a privileged position on the modern Greek and international stage, Electra has
been performed since the 18th century in the original, in translation and in adaptation.
Most of these productions constitute major artistic events as the play’s reception history
indicates, highlighting the wide diversity and complex interconnections between
different dramatic traditions, performance schools and stage languages. Revived at the
peak of crucial historical and political trajectories, the play is preoccupied with time and
history, the personal and the collective, conflict, guilt and revenge, violence and justice,
scrutinizing simultaneously subjectivity, responsibility and the possibility of catharsis
from matricide, for the central hero is a vengeful daughter.

The pervasiveness of the 20th Freudian century’s influence with its wars,
revolutions, its historical traumas and apprehensions in conjunction with the
performance reception of Electra from the Neoclassical era to the New
Millennium, galvanized very conflicting engagements with the tragic heroine:
from Ben Jonson (1604), Crebillon (1708), Brumoy (1730), Voltaire (1750),
Alfieri (1783), Schlegel (1803), Jeanin (1821), Soume (1822), and Bayley’s
(1825) idealized and idolized statuesque Grecian daughter as a figure of
resistance against the oppressor to the catalytic impact of the
Hofmannsthal/Reindhardt hysteric and ecstatic Elektra (1903) that informs all
subsequent productions of the play, the list counts a new wave of figurations of
Electra that never ceases to surprise audiences and readers. Without a doubt, the
Electras that haunt most of the post‐1903 productions of the Sophoclean play,
owe a great deal to the iconic Hofmannsthal/Reindhardt Elektra and her
pathological obsession, the violent energy, the fiercely uncompromising mania of
the female mourner and avenger. Physically debilitated and mentally shattered,
Electra is steeped into a perseverant frenetic hatred rather than a noble
desperation and sadness. She is exhausted, ailing, a mere spectre of the living.
 And yet, Electra, whose name ironically means “without a bed,” electrifies the
contemporary theatrical stage like very few female dramatic characters.

The dialogue that opens up between the saga of the Atreides and modernity is
equally impressive. For the fin de siècle may well be termed “Electra’s century,”
overshadowing even Oedipus in its darkness and despair. The Sophoclean
Electra that has admittedly not enjoyed the long stage and philosophical career
of Antigone and Oedipus, returns dynamically. In fact, the 20th Oedipal century
announced the resurgence of an interest in Electra, the female psyche, as what
Bernard Knox calls the most “self‐analytical” of tragic heroes, and the Sophoclean
play as an astute study and intense examination into the “psychopathology of
revenge” (E.Hall). Likewise, works on the myth by Eugene O’Neill (1929‐31),
Dylan Thomas (1933), Edward and Christine Longford (1935), Louis MacNeice
(1936), Girodoux (1937), Eliot (1939), Sartre (1943), Yioursenar (1944),
Howptman (1947), Streller (1951), Plath (1957), Vitez (1966), Ronconi (1972),
Tom Murphy (1975), Peter Stein (1980), Peter Hall, Tadassi Suzuki, Tom Paulin
(1990), Warner/Shaw (1992), Sarah Kane, Seamus Heaney (1996), Marinna Carr
(2002), Simon Doyle (2010) and Frank McGuinness (1997), open up new
perspectives on the idea of the tragic experience through the lens of Electra’s
suffering. Looking at the sinuous aesthetic and ideological evolution of
productions of Electra since the 20th century, one can only anticipate in the
century of Electra and Orestes not just new figurations and new vocabularies,
but multiple narrative, ideological, and theoretical lacunae that Electra’s tragedy
generates ad infinitum.