Brie Larson makes the London stage debut

Here is one question: you have a Hollywood star who gives your West End debut in London with very little theatrical experience. What do you do to dispel concerns – in the actress herself or her audience? Of course, you give her a handheld microphone for the entire piece.

Well, no, you don’t.

In addition to the practical reference (many actors nowadays have hidden microphones) there are greater conceptual reason for Daniel Fish’s move. With her Buzz Cut and the Bikini Kill T-shirt, Brie Larsons Elektra is presented as a rebel, provocateur and as an obsessively angry soul, which could definitely carry her microphone through the city to accelerate her mother and insult the world. She even has some Laurie Anderson-like amp effects for a good measure, especially if she mocks, and it is true that when mentioning someone she loathes, she is strangely satisfactory.

In addition, the choir often uses microphone stands and sometimes accepts rock star poses when they sing their lines. So it is one thing, all part of the plan.

And yet when Shouty Elektra drowns out her less assisted opponents – the barely audible sister Chrysothemis (Marième Diouf), the constant, undemonstrative mother Clytemnestra (Stock -Channing) and others – the academic dissonance feels both essential and irritating and irritating; And when Larson does not lay down the microphone during the 80-minute production, even in electras darkest, defeated moments, it is difficult not to ask yourself whether this is the prophocation of the character or the actor.

In short, it is a distraction, one of many in this strange fascinating but also messy and confusing interpretation. Fish achieved great success on Broadway and London in 2019 Oklahoma!Not least for his daring revisionism. But if this production revealed new depth and meaning in its source and at the same time honor its fundamental attraction, the same magic is missing here. Whatever the intention, Fish’s attitude of Sophocles’ heated history of grief and revenge misses two essential ambitions: it does not feel tragically – in fact it is extremely unemployed – and despite the impressive modernity of Anne Carson’s translation, it does not combine .

Sophocles is currently in fashion in London, so far sparkling and adequately devastating effects. Autumn saw two productions AntigonePresent The other placeWith Emma d’Arcy, who converted the bubbling passions and offenses of the myth into a contemporary English family home and Robert Icke, and Robert Icke’s OedipusWhat Mark Strongs did to fail in a very similar general election in Great Britain. Both were extremely original and kept the twisted, gripping and intensely moving provocations of their source. And both reflected a crisis of the family, politics and society that applies to today.

Fish searches for a similar perception, although he tries to be messed up and affected.

Of course, the scenario is far from everyday life: Elektra is consumed by the desire for bloody revenge on her mother, who murdered her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy with her beloved Aegisthus (Greg Hicks). Although Elektra’s brother Orestes (Patrick Vaill) shares her vengeful wish, he refuses to return from the hiding place. In the meantime, she feels trapped, undesirable and misunderstood in the home of the two people.

In contrast to Hamlet, who is exposed to a largely similar situation, Elektra undoubtedly experiences her wish for revenge without avoiding her parents. And in contrast to the Danish prince, her justice is undermined by the fact that Clytemnestra has murdered her husband on almost the same impulse as her punishment for his brutal killing of another daughter. Elektras friends, the choir of the piece, warn against repeating the bloody cycle without success.

So it can be a difficult character. In the last production of the play here, a decade ago, injected Kristin Scott Thomas (who repeated a tested collaboration with director Ian Rickson) in her presentation, which injected an urgently needed humor into her presentation and created a figure that despite her obsession round, even felt grounded.

Fish and Larson have decided to emphasize electras anger and frustration, a decision that the Riot Grrrl T-shirt and the punk attitude undoubtedly informs. However, this does not make this a feminist interpretation, only aggressive, with gimmicks: a machine that jumps over the actor’s black ink (Larson stays over the neck with a wide stripe, another distraction), an outbreak of pop music, this increases Nothing and serving no recognizable purpose, the microphones.

It is a shame, because the translation is fantastic, a moment of heartbreaking (“no rest, no call, no number for a grief like this”), the next colloquially Ribald (Clytemnestra is a “howling bitch”) or with the acerbic cute that could be found in an American teen film (“Why not run and tell the mother”). It is only lost in the mixture. Larson’s performance works best when she stretches her voice and how the Chor Carson’s poetic lines can sing. Sometimes she also finds the irony that exists there. But for the most part, its delivery is flat, a monotonic bark that alienates when it should move.

Channing increases above the disorder. Your Clytemnestra looks a little in her fur coat and is tired, tired of what your daughter intends, but also wonderfully haughty. Your prayer to Apollo is a joy. It’s a shame that there is no longer from her or Hicks’ Lugubrian, creepy Aegisthus.

Vaill, who won as Jud Fry in Fish’s Oklahoma! Do not give much space to shine as Orestes. But he is better than his unreliable messenger with a heavily delivered monologue in which he lies in a car race about the death of Orestes. The choir, beautiful singer, whose striking presence in satin and coaches is the most interesting visual in a mere environment, increase the temperature when they offer their many ignored laundry of wisdom.

Venue: Duke of York’s Theater, London
Occupation: Brie Larson, Hannah Bristow, Stockard Channing, Wallis Currie-Wood, Marième Diouf, Jo Goldsmith-Eteson, Greg Hicks, Nardia Ruth, Rebecca Thorn, Patrick Vaill, Adeola Yemitan
Dramatist: Sophocles, translation by Anne Carson
Director: Daniel Fish
Set designer: Jeremy Herbert
Costume designer: Doey Lüthi
Lighting designer: Adam Silverman
Music: Tim Hearne
Sound designer: Max and Ben Ringham
Presented by Empire Street Productions