Electra
The
Cambridge Greek Play 2001
A post-production response
from Jane Montgomery
A
post-production response from Jane Montgomery (21st February 2002)
in which she reflects on the experience of directing the Cambridge
Greek Play at the end of 2001. (Also available is a transcript
of a recorded interview (May 2001) between Jane Montgomery
and Lorna Hardwick when Jane was at an early stage in her thinking
about the production ).
Click for reviews
of the production
LH: A striking
Feature of the production was the video screens (e.g. with footage
from Orestes' childhood). What factors influenced you in including
these and how did you select the material to be shown?
JM: The video use
was a 3-pronged idea. The first thoughts came from when I'd been
acting Electra in '99. Part of my character preparation was imagining
certain scenes/memories which repeated endlessly in my/her head.
They ended up becoming a type of acting short-cut to get me into
character quickly. Back stage, or during certain moments during
the play (notably the Tutor's speech) I could switch into an imagined
scene/memory and use the image to kick-start a new chain of emotion.
Occasionally the order of the scenes would change in my mind -
one night I might focus more on Orestes, one on Clytemnestra -
but the specifics of the replayed scenes were the same… and
were accompanied in my mind by either the sound of a 78rpm record
player in the next room playing Strauss waltzes, or Britten's
arrangement of 'O Waly waly' - something about their plaintive
sentimentality I guess - can't think why else as the choice now
seems pretty arbitrary. Later, as a director when I started preliminary
design meetings for the play, I wasn't sure whether there was
any mileage at all in using the replayed scene idea…. after
all, it'd been an acting tool and was a very private process.
An I felt it essential that the actress playing Electra should
be able to make up her own world and develop her own character
short-cuts - she didn't need my imagination foisted on her. But,
despite my initial doubts, Michael Spencer [the designer] and
I kept coming back to the idea of the repeated images. The circularity
of the images, their repetition, the specificity of their gnawing
presence seemed to sum up exactly Electra's predicament…
constantly replaying the same images, day after day - self-perpetuating
her death-in-life and life-in-death existence. And there is also
something very odd about time and Electra's perception of it in
this play - time for her is synchronic and diachronic, endless
and instantaneous - just the sort of temporal distortion that
happens in film… Michael was initially quite keen on having
a split screen taking up most of the set, simultaneously showing
repeated memories and Electra on stage as if caught on a security
video [these discussions started in '99, just before the RNT's
Oresteia, and there's an interesting coincidence in his
initial vision of the use of video]. But we couldn't find the
logic to the dual use: two very different metatheatrical devices
and purposes that just didn't make theatrical sense for us. The
logic came with the development of the chorus. We had discussed
many different approaches tot he chorus, and from day one agreed
that they could not have any vestige of naturalism - they had
to be simultaneously metatheatrical in terms of the production,
and part of Electra's psyche in terms of the characterisational
'reality'. So, they became 6 china doll versions of Electra, or
rather her internal Furies, or rather her super-ego, or rather
her imagination of herself on the night of Agamemnon's murder
…. Which actually all amount to the same thing for her. There's
an interesting thing in the text: every time Electra just starts
to calm down, the chorus manages to stoke her up again with insulting
Job's-comforter platitudes or with reminders of just how unfortunate
her lot is. We though if there is any mileage in the videos. It'll
be as part of that - the chorus rub salt in the wound )or perhaps
scratch the scab_ by manipulating the images which goad Electra
(if you like, just as Electra's super-ego reproaches her, dragging
her further in self-harm in her endless replaying of corrosive
memories). The chorus are for her and of her, and their manipulation
acts as a prompt to make her remember and an aid to reinforce
the image.
As for the choice
of scenes, they were visual representations of what Electra actually
describes in her lines - So we have Agamemnon as the best of fathers
(waltzing with the little girl Electra on the beach), Orestes
"her darling", "blazing like a star" (as the six year old boy
play acting at being the hero), the night of Agamemnon's murder
(the blood trail leading to his foot), and then various images
of Clytemnestra the whore/mother-no-mother (in bed with Aegisthus/reclining
on the beach, years before the murder but just as indifferent
to Electra) and her and Aegisthus' humiliation of Electra (the
post-coital lovers gloating over her). The feel of them was to
be home-movie (early colour super 8) for Orestes and Agamemnon,
and something much more cold/peculiar for Clytemnestra (in the
end, Andrea Zimmerman, the video artist who recorded and edited
the footage, rendered the Clytemnestra scenes to mirror and pulsate).
Each scene was cut with other scenes to provide the sequence of
images recounted in the text.
As is ever the case
with these ideas, we ended up using less than we had originally
anticipated. I'm a bit wary of the over use of multimedia in plays,
and was determined to preserve the internal logic we'd found for
their use. Consequently, we concentrated on the video screens
only at very specific moments of the play when the pressure on
Electra's imagination and memory was most extreme, and always
tried to abide by the logic that they can only be used when there
is a specific manipulatory reason for the chorus to show Electra
the image.
LH: What factors
governed the staging of the Chorus? E.g. numbers, pose, movement,
costume?
JM: Well, the first
problem with this play is "Who is the Chorus?" . I was once in
the chorus of this play, and it was extremely difficult to find
any 'reality' to hang on to as an actor. Unlike the eponymous
Euripidean choruses, these chorus women have no identity and no
happy correspondence to the theatrical world of the play. Their
contribution is peculiar, and if the general critical assumption
that they are there to provide paramuthia (consolation
) for Electra is all there is, the chorus become a relative insignificance.
If that's the case, that their sole purpose is to give the heroine
comfort, not only are they dull, but, it has to be admitted they
are not very good at their job. Each platitudinous word of comfort
they give either goads Electra to further rage or prompts her
to fall into a despair of self-hate at her shamelessness. Add
to that the very peculiar alienation of the choral stasima, and
you're left completely uncertain as to who or what this chorus
is all about.
So I decided I had
the stark choice of either cutting the chorus or altering my perception
of them. Very early on, I went for the first idea. I liked the
idea of Electra speaking their lines to herself (a bit like the
Jonathon Pryce' Hamlet, I guess, when he disgorged the voice of
Old Hamlet), and replaying choral odes on an old gramophone. But
relatively early on I realised that those were ideas that just
would not work in this production, and that the physical presence
of the chorus would add immeasurably to the theatrical world of
the play. So, Michael and I started working out how they would
be if their Job's comforter role was taken to metatheatrical extremes.
After playing around with various Kafkaesque possibilities that
were all discarded for being either meaningless or poor imitations
of Robert Wilson, we clicked that of course the chorus were Electra
and she was they - 'mirror, mirror on the wall', or an even more
twisted take on Dorian Gray. So, as explained above, they
and Electra were dressed in identical pink silk dresses (Electra's
first ball gown, put on especially for Daddy's homecoming from
Troy, and the chorus image preserved how Electra looked just before
Agamemnon's murder, while Electra herself was in the humiliated
present, wearing the same dress 12 years of suffering and degradation
down the line. Crucially, only Electra ever saw or interacted
with the chorus - they were entirely metatheatrical - necessitating
some small adaptation of lines. As for the practicalities, the
number of chorus - 6 - was dictated by the set and the sight lines
of the Arts Theatre, and it turned out to be the ideal number.
It meant there could be an interesting dynamic between them, without
crowding or conversely isolation.
Blocking and movement
style and patterns came mostly from the rehearsal room floor,
and from the admirable experimentation and adaptability of the
chorus. I was asking of them a very difficult acting exercise.
Not only had they the difficulty of the music, the Greek (five
out of six didn't know the language), and playing metatheatrical
constructs (never an easy thing at the best of ) but I was
asking them to develop their own patterns of movement. Early on
we had had some waltzing classes and I'd asked them initially
to model their movement on Viennese waltzes, done with excruciating
slowness. Once we hit the blocking stage, I gave them certain
provisional starting and end positions, some specific cues for
turning video screens and occasional synchronised gestures (like
dropping their dolls at the news of Orestes death, or the unison
blood-letting movement), and let them get on with it, asking them
to experiment as they felt the urge during the rest of the scenes.
Gradually as the episodes took firmer shape, I was able to concentrate
on watching the chorus's physical improvisation and hone what
worked and discard what didn't. we ended up with something that
was deliberately alienated and alienating; as witnessed by some
of the audiences' confusion with the concept. Interestingly, several
members of the audience took them to be Geisha girls, which bemused
me as the thought had never crossed any of our minds - but it
was perhaps a significant observation. Their absence of individuality
and cosmetic over feminisation, both inscrutable and disturbing
- 6 images of Daddy's little girl; innocent but sexual; as hard
and as fragile as china.
LH: Were there
significant ways in which the staging changed or developed during
the rehearsal process?
Michael and I had
decided on the general shape of the design about a year before
rehearsals began. This time frame is a real luxury and accounts
for the very few changes that happened during the rehearsal process.
The biggest problem is always the practical/financial, and Michael
and I were slightly prevented from realising some of our design
ideas by the very basic and very insurmountable issue of performing
in a proscenium arch theatre. Nevertheless, by the time the company
came to approach rehearsing in the mark-up, we were very comfortable
with the basic shape, and the only change we needed to make was
cutting the original 4 monitors to 2 because of space and sight
lines.
The staging is an
interesting question. Looking back, I don't know that we ever
really blocked the play. Put actors on that set, with that play,
and there are only a finite number of combinations of movements.
I work from the actor's perspective and by and large believe that
if an actor knows their character, they will know where to move.
So really, the only major directorial development was realising
the need for stillness in many of the scenes. After some experimentation,
it became clear, for instance, that Orestes and the Tutor need
hardly move at all during their first scene, that there is a very
still simplicity to the aftermath of the recognition scene that
is counterpointed by the extremity of Electra's lyrics, that with
all the scenes, again and again, the less we did, the better it
was (…and thinking back, the most common note to the cast
was to stop acting). The discoveries came in the chorus work,
and repeatedly in the character discoveries came in the chorus
work, and repeatedly I the character development. Since acting
myself in the play a couple of yeas before, I'd had ideas I'd
wanted to try out with characters. Some of these worked, some
didn't.
It was great fun,
for instance, to play about with Chrysothemis's 'breakfast to
go' in the first scene, but it didn't work for Clytemnestra to
stub out the eyes on Agamemnon's photo with her cigarette. Whereas
her burnt offering of banknotes to Apollo worked, her offering
of her wedding trousseau to Agamemnon just didn't. Other 'props
business' altered as rehearsals progressed: Orestes' hip flask
turned into a receptacle for blood-offerings rather than whisky
and Electra's tin of mementoes took on a life of its own. There
was a great deal of specific characterisation work with the actors,
but very little 'staging' ... perhaps the only exception to that
was the development of the doll props for the chorus, which required
occasional bursts of quite careful blocking.
LH: You decided
to have surtitles. How did this decision affect other aspects
of the production? (e.g. especially non-verbal aspects of communication)
JM: I'm still unsure
about the surtitles. They are a massive boon/safety net for the
audience who doesn't know the play (were sold out for six of the
eight performances, and many audience members said that the surtitles
were a crucial factor in their deciding to book), but I do feel
that some of the immediacy, viscerality, sheer theatrical force
of the Greek, they play, the experience is lost by having the
extra framing device to hurdle. Now I love this play, and I was
proud of the production, but even I felt curious alienated watching
the show in a way that I haven't with other plays I've directed.
Retrospectively I wonder whether the surtitles had something to
do with this distancing … something lost in the translation.
Do you, as an audience member, allow yourself to surmise meaning
and thereby develop a new form of theatrical perception and understanding
when you have the easiness and security of a simultaneous translation
offered? We didn't, translate Trojan Women, and the audience
response was more immediate - they were forced to connect to the
internal rhythms of meaning, conveyed purely by sound and gesture.
But then again, Electra is such an odd play - no easy ending,
no catharsis (well, you could say that about a lot of Greek tragedies,
but this one is particularly odd)… perhaps the alienation
is right for this play. Ultimately, I was left feeling that the
surtitles worked well in this production because of the metatheatricality
of the play and our interpretation but that it wouldn't work so
well on, say, Hippolytus or Hekabe, or indeed, an
Electra which was more 'traditional'. It'll be very interesting
to see what happens in the next Triennial.
As for any directorial
decisions that came from the surtitles - well, the main one was
an idea that in the end was just not practicable, to have a second
sur-title box actually on the set [above the palace entrance]
with stage directions and snippets from the play flashed up in
ancient Greek. Sight-lines, software and finances made that impossible
- a shame: I'd have loved it. The actors of course ignored the
surtitles (although were some amazed to hear audience's responding
to the specific ironies of their lines), and the only difficulty
was synching the software to the action. Incidentally, the sight
lines at the Arts are such that there will always be three entire
rows unable to see the surtitles. We were eventually able to give
those rows simultaneous audio translations … I'd be interested
to know the relative, qualitative difference in having surtitles
or audio description in terms of making the audience alienated
from the action.
Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English