Directing Greek Tragedy

Carrie Cracknell on Electra

Russ Hope

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780016986
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Follow acclaimed theatre director Carrie Cracknell throughout preparation and rehearsals for her production of Sophocles' Electra at the Gate Theatre, London, translated by Nick Payne and praised by the Evening Standard as an 'urgent new version'.

With unprecedented access to the rehearsal room, the book outlines exactly what it takes to get a play from the page to the stage, from first concept to first night. It provides an invaluable, practical handbook - part portrait, part masterclass - on how to stage Greek tragedy in the twenty-first century, and a revealing insight into the work of one of the UK's most exciting young directors.

Carrie Cracknell's other directing credits include Macbeth and A Doll's House, starring Hattie Morahan, at the Young Vic, and Medea, starring Helen McCrory, in the Olivier auditorium at the National Theatre.

Directing Greek Tragedy was first published as part of Getting Directions: A Fly-on-the-Wall Guide for Emerging Theatre Directors by Russ Hope.

'Vital reading for anyone working or wanting to work as a director' The Public Reviews on Getting Directions

Electra

by Nick Payne after Sophocles

The Gate Theatre in association with the Young Vic

Carrie Cracknell is associate director at the Young Vic and was formerly joint artistic director of the Gate Theatre with Natalie Abrahami (2007–2012), where her productions included Breathing Irregular, Hedda, I Am Falling (also at Sadler’s Wells and nominated for a South Bank Show Award in Dance), Armageddon and The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents. Other directing credits include A Doll’s House (Young Vic), Dolls (National Theatre of Scotland), Stacy (Tron, Glasgow), A Mobile Thriller (national tour and Harbourfront, Toronto) and Broken Road (British Council Showcase).

‘I direct because it’s an addiction. Because it never gets any easier. Because when it all comes together – actors, staging, audience, and you get it right – nothing beats it.’

Carrie Cracknell

Electra

by Nick Payne after Sophocles

Opened at the Gate Theatre, London, on 7 April 2011.

Creative

Director Carrie Cracknell

Designer Holly Waddington

Lighting Designer Guy Hoare

Music and Sound Designer Tom Mills

Movement Director Georgina Lamb

Cast

Electra Cath Whitefield

Clytemnestra Madeleine Potter

Chrysothemis Natasha Broomfield

Orestes Alex Price

Strophius Martin Turner

Young Electra Yasmin Garrad/Fern Deacon

The Notion

The King and Queen of Mycenae, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, had four children: Electra, Chrysothemis, Orestes and Iphigenia. Agamemnon was a great general in the Greek army, and when his country went to war against Troy, he led the charge. Whilst away, he angered the gods, who demanded as payment that he offer young Iphigenia as a blood sacrifice. Agamemnon lured his wife and child to Troy where he cut Iphigenia’s throat. His soldiers’ lives were at stake, he said. It was a transaction: one life for thousands. Clytemnestra disagreed. She returned to Greece where she found a lover, Aegisthus, and when Agamemnon returned from Troy, she lured him to the bath with the promise of a relaxing soak and with Aegisthus’ help she held him under the water and stabbed him until the water turned red. The King’s body was discovered and, in the chaos, Electra smuggled her young brother Orestes out of the palace to an ally of her father’s. Electra and Chrysothemis stayed behind. Years passed. Whatever grief Chrysothemis may now feel, she does not articulate it. Meanwhile, Electra incubates her anger, which simmers within her chest. Then, one day, Orestes returns to avenge his father. First, he will kill Clytemnestra, and then he’ll kill Aegisthus, just as –

‘Woah. Woah. Woah.’

Jenny Worton raises her hand and Carrie Cracknell, the director, stops her recap of the story. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jenny says. ‘The rule is: you kill the biggest baddie last. That’s not Aegisthus! The story is about the mother and the children.’

Carrie and Jenny are sitting either side of Carrie’s kitchen table opposite Holly Waddington, the designer, and Nick Payne, the writer. The creative team for a new production of Electra meets for the first time today and, as a past collaborator of Carrie’s, Jenny attends to offer some dramaturgical advice. Right now, her expression seems to ask whether anyone in the room has ever seen a horror movie.

The workshop

The story is the myth of Electra as told by Sophocles. Carrie and Holly have presented Electra before, in June 2010, in a studio space at the Young Vic: a workshop production that flew under the radar of the national press and gave its tickets away for free. Then, they used a translation of the play by the poet Anne Carson, which stays relatively close to the structure of Sophocles’ play.

But although Carrie felt ‘playful and unleashed’ in directing the movement sections, which involve the chorus, she found other elements of the production challenging. Sophocles’ characters often speak to each other in uninterrupted, minutes-long speeches and, to mobilise the text, Carrie struggled to resist directing by ‘making beautiful stage pictures’, which is to say, ‘telling the actors where to stand’. And as she explored the play’s many themes – family loyalty, fate, the governance of troubled states – Carrie became drawn to the psychology of its central character, and to the possibility of exploring in more detail the long-term impact of that central, horrific event – Agamemnon’s death – on three very different children. She started to develop ideas for a ‘cleaner, clearer and more psychologically direct’ version of the story for a modern audience.

Soon after, the decision was taken to explore Electra in a full production, this time at the Gate, the intimate theatre in Notting Hill that Carrie ran with Natalie Abrahami until early 2012. Carrie decided to commission a new version of Electra, one that would inhabit a world of ‘epic possibility’ that allows for movement and music, but be anchored by psychologically acute acting.

The new writer is Nick Payne, whom Carrie praises for the perceptiveness of his writing about human behaviour, his ear for dialogue and his skill at writing female characters (four of the six characters in the play are women).

Translations and versions

‘Translation is always a treason,’ Kakuzō tells us in The Book of Tea. ‘It can at its best be only the reverse of a brocade – all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.’

Plays written in another time, or in another language, used to be performed in translation. Now, they often appear in versions by other playwrights. This distinction can be confusing at first. At its simplest, a translation is the source material rendered scene for scene, most likely in the same socio-historical context, and with its rhythms and images translated as faithfully as the new language allows. Often the translator is an academic or a bilingual playwright fluent in the language of the original.

A version is something freer, which develops the source material. The writer is usually an established playwright, commissioned for the idiosyncrasies of his original work. He may expand or contract themes in the original, although he should do so intelligently, maintaining its identity and dramatic allure.

In approaching Electra, Carrie is keen that Nick develops the play, and that the new version, whilst ‘still feeling like Electra’, invites his own artistic contribution.

A new version

Developing the new version, Carrie and Nick are keen to explore the story’s motor, which is to say, what is special about today that sets the events of the play in motion. Sophocles’ Electra carries her grief for some number of years, but Sophocles does not explore how many, nor does he provide a trigger event that causes Electra’s anger to boil over on the day that the action takes place, an issue that most actors and directors, post-Stanislavsky, will want to address. ‘I can’t say to an actor “You’ve felt this way for ten years but it’s particularly raw today for some reason”,’ Carrie says, as she and Nick discuss what path the new version might take.

Nick’s solution is to place the action at the tenth anniversary of Agamemnon’s death, which hangs in the air, pressing down on all who live and work in the palace, but most of all on Electra, who has become so disobedient that Aegisthus has convinced Clytemnestra to have Electra ‘sent away’ from the palace (most likely imprisoned). Nick proposes that the play begins with Aegisthus away from the palace to make the arrangements. Today is Electra’s last chance to act.

Aegisthus, for his part, may not feature in the production at all. Sophocles’ Aegisthus is discussed by the other characters, but only turns up at the end of the play and is almost immediately killed by Orestes. At the script meeting, Nick wonders aloud if, following the death of Clytemnestra, the death of a character as yet unseen might be less than satisfying. His instinct is that Aegisthus should either be cut entirely, or have his role expanded, perhaps as a terrifying dictator or as a ‘sweater-wearing, Guardian-reading stepdad’ whose only crime, in the children’s eyes, is having replaced their father in their mother’s affections.

To cut or reconceive a character might be to alter a play fundamentally, and in discussing Aegisthus, Nick and Carrie are mindful of what the play might gain or lose in doing so. Eventually, they decide that Aegisthus is to be cut. The story of Electra is old grudges, and Aegisthus is not family.

Also cut is Pylades, Orestes’ friend who is present in the first scene of Sophocles’ play as Orestes and his tutor arrive at the palace, but does not speak. Orestes’ tutor (named by Sophocles for his job, although often transliterated as ‘Pedagogus’) is given the name Strophius after the ally of Agamemnon who hid the child Orestes on the night of his father’s murder.

Workshop

A month before rehearsals begin, Carrie holds a two-day workshop to explore questions that she and Nick have about staging the script. Two of the parts have already been cast. Cath Whitefield will play Electra and Madeleine Potter will play Clytemnestra. Cath and Madeleine attend the workshop with the actor Alison O’Donnell, an ‘ally’ of Carrie’s, who will play whomever else the scene demands.

Carrie articulates her goals upfront, which are, on the day I visit, to explore:

• The effect on the young Electra of witnessing Agamemnon’s death.

• The manner of Clytemnestra’s death and how much of it (if any) should be depicted onstage.

• The visual vocabulary of the chorus.

• The role of music.

Agamemnon’s death

Whilst they have no intention of depicting it in the production, C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On a Lighting Gantry
• Directing Greek Tragedy by Carrie Cracknell
• Epilogue: Asking Better Questions
• Other Titles
• About the Author
• Copyright Information