Theatre Review
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Elektra Sophocles,
in a new translation by Ezra Pound While Ezra Pound was incarcerated in a psychiatric home in Washington
DC awaiting trial for treason in 1949, he spent his time working on
a translation of Sophocles' Elektra with Rudd Fleming. This
partial translation has been completed and adapted for performance
by director Edwin Hawkes and company. The story is a seldom-seen part of the Trojan War cycle, a kind of
Hamlet-for-girls where Elektra has to cope with her mother's (Klytemnestra)
killing her father (Agamemnon) and taking another man to bed. She
spends the play plotting revenge, and awaiting the arrival of her
hero brother, Orestes, who will set all to rights. Superficially,
we are presented with a happy ending ; the unjust are killed, and
the just triumphant. But the play has darker undercurrents: Is revenge
the appropriate response? In championing revenge, does a person set
themselves up for vengeance in their turn? Pound's translation presents the play in a rich vernacular, while
keeping the characters' bitterness and desolation firmly in mind.
The resulting dialogues have the sharp immediacy of a modern gangster
film or soap opera, and are played here with great verve and determination.
But when the play moves into the more stylised monologues, the players
falter, veering between comedy and over-seriousness. The Chorus faces
a similar problem : with Elektra presented as a sulky teenager, the
Chorus has been recast as the outer expression of her neuroses, complete
with colour coding and fantastic fluorescent painted masks. But their
role is difficult. Should they be trying to comment on the story,
or concentrating on victimising Elektra? Faced with the difficulty of performing a coherent play while exploring the opportunities for greater method and realism offered by Pound's text, Hawkes' company has opted to try for a performance which is at once stylised and naturalistic - a difficult, but interesting choice. Jeremy Dennis, 20 / 2 / 01 |