‘Bergman is a north star for me’ … Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in the film that inspired Electra/Persona.
In a bold new production starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, the NT is fusing Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman. So what can two stories written 23 centuries apart tell us about how we live today?
In around 420BC, Sophocles staged Electra, in which the title character avenges the murder of her father by her mother, Clytemnestra. In 1966, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman premiered Persona, in which a psychiatric nurse, Alma, is caring for Elisabeth, an actor who has suffered a breakdown while playing Electra. These two dramas, written 23 centuries apart, are now sharing the stage in an alluring new National Theatre production.
In Electra/Persona, director Benedict Andrews has paired the stories before and after the interval, linked by a stunning coup de theatre at the end of the first half. “Persona is a pinnacle of modernist cinema and Bergman is a north star for me,” says Andrews. “I’ve long been fascinated by the impossibility – in a good way – of staging Persona, because it is so much about the camera and the silence and the closeup: the face as a terrain. And I was always fascinated by why Bergman chose to have Elisabeth break down while playing Electra, so I wanted to put them together. I think it’s become clear in rehearsal that the whole evening is one cycle of grief.”
Early on, Andrews (Australian-born, Iceland-resident and identifying as “Ice-Stralian”) had the idea that Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss would alternate the roles of Electra and Clytemnestra in Electra, and Elisabeth and Alma in Persona; whoever plays Electra in the first half reappears as Elisabeth, and Clytemnestra reappears as Alma. The original plan was for Blanchett and Hoss to toss a coin on stage at the start of the evening but Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which a coin lands heads 92 times in succession, made this strategy risky.
‘They are astonishing actresses’ … Blanchett, left, and Hoss. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images
“Also,” says Andrews, “I said to Cate and Nina, ‘To play your best game do you need to wake up in the morning and study your Electra or Persona text?’ And they said maybe. In the end, they will have a schedule and swap night by night but the audience won’t know who’s playing who until the first one walks in.” And if I say to the box office that I’ve seen one combination and want to see the other, they won’t tell me when? Andrews pauses. “No.”
Although he is known for staging radical new versions of classics – including Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse in 2024, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire on a rotating set at the Young Vic in 2014 – Electra/Persona is a bold project. Another writer-director, Alan Ayckbourn, once said that, while directing, he found himself cursing what the writer had given him to do. Did Andrews understand what it would be like effectively having to rehearse two plays twice each to prepare the various permutations?
“Yeah. Long rehearsal days,” he sighs with a laugh. “Yesterday, unusually, we stayed in Electra all day but I still did an hour on Persona at the end. I think it’s really important to do both every day. Although they require very different energies. It’s not a double-bill; it’s one hinged work. There are perforations from Bergman in the first half and from Sophocles in the second half.”
By this stage, Andrews considers himself only a director: “We have this joke with the cast about there having been a writer. We call him Dominic. He was chained to a table for two weeks here to do rewrites but now we’ve put him on a trawler back to Iceland.”
‘We are watching American imperialism fall apart’ … Andrews. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian
I recently saw a hit show in which the understudy was on – they did an impersonation of the absent performer, which is standard in the circumstances. But will Blanchett and Hoss have a different interaction? “Absolutely. They are two actresses who are equally astonishing but play their instruments differently. Cate and Nina are good mates and had done the film Tár, in which Nina plays Cate’s wife. So I thought it would be great to do something with them. They don’t look the same but there’s an echo between them: they could be sisters. In rehearsal, you see them thinking, ‘Oh, they did that in that bit? Do I take that or do my own interpretation?’ We’re searching for something in which they each play the logic of the scene, but it may come out in different ways.”
When I tell him that his Donmar Warehouse Cherry Orchard was completely different the two times I saw it, he nods enthusiastically, even though some directors would greet this with a public inquiry. “Good!” he says. “I saw the [romantic rejection] scene between Lopakhin and Varya dozens of times in rehearsal and then performance – and it was different each time. And I encourage that because, in the end, you want the truth of that moment played each night. As a director, you have set up a perpetuum mobile that the actors can continue to develop.”
Andrews is having an Ancient Greek period, his previous show being a version in Iceland of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, which shares characters with Electra including Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra herself. So is there a big overlap between his back-to-back Greek tragedies? “Huge. I moved bits across between the two shows. I spent the bulk of last year doing my text for The Oresteia. Then there was a gap before rehearsals began – for it to be translated into Icelandic – in which I wrote Electra/Persona. Which I hadn’t expected to be on so quickly. I hadn’t expected to be living with this crazy fucking family for so long!”
‘I hadn’t expected to be living with this crazy family for so long!’ … Andrews’ Oresteia at the National Theatre, Reyjavik. Photograph: Owen Fiene
Both shows are chamber pieces – five actors in Reykjavik, four in London – so apart from the role-swapping in Electra/Persona, there is also role-play, in which the back stories of off-stage characters are acted out: “It’s sometimes something like a Gestalttherapy game where you play your oppressor. And ‘persona’is the word for masks, for the roles we play. The king and the judge put on those robes and play those roles. How does theatre critique all these power relationships? But, in another way, how does theatre allow us to interrogate all those roles we play in our own lives, our psyche and our dream lives?”
From the meeting room at the National Theatre where we talk, it’s a short walk to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey at the BFI Southbank or to Simon Stone’s The Oresteia at The Bridge. If the descendants of the Ancient Greek writers were on royalties, they would all have private jets. “Yes! I think they’re coming back at the moment because, in these times of big political and moral crisis, we need them. The reason we are digging in this Greek rubble and soil is that these plays were made in an imperial warring empire, that was first triumphant and then later broke apart. And we are watching that with American imperialism now.
“We grew up with the idea that the US – our Rome, our Athens – was a military might but also a cultural might. And it’s breaking apart. So we go back to a culture that lived through wars but also gave us philosophy and theatre and gave Freud the Oedipus myth for unpacking a family. And these plays should also make us question notions of law and justice.”
There is an increasingly strong Australian directorial presence in London. As well as Stone, whose Oresteia follows his Phaedra and The Lady From The Sea, Kip Williams has frequently worked in the city: recently on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and The Maids. Does Andrews have a WhatsApp group or reunion barbecues with his fellow expats? “Not really. But Kip was my assistant director. Simon acted in a production of mine, rotating in a glass box in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We all know each other and have collaborators that we share.”
Andrews, Stone and Williams all visually or structurally disrupt classic texts – is that an Australian thing? A sort of textual anticolonialism or republicanism? “When I did my first Three Sisters in Sydney, the [Chekhov] tradition was still lace and linen. I got letters saying you’ve taken Coca-Cola and poured it into a vat of fine malt whisky. Barrie Kosky was doing something similar and we possibly were a battering ram against the conservatism of Australian state theatre then. But I’d worked a lot in Germany, where radical rethinking is what the director does, so it never made sense to me to be ‘faithful’ to classics. What does that even mean? I don’t think of it as disrupting classics. I’m trying to access the mythic power in the piece; X-ray the inner meaning.”
