The House of Atreus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 11

The House of Atreus

OME years ago, I saw Peggy Ashcroft play Sophocles’ Electra at the Old Vic. It was an enormous and shattering experience, colossal in scale, the characters huge abstractions rather than persons, with a battery of formidable and implacable gods behind them impassively recording their doom, It was therefore with the deepest interest that I listened last week to the BBC production of the Electra of Euripides. The play moves with the tremendous stride of Greek tragedy, but is both smaller in. size and more, human than in Sophocles’ play; the gods, too, are much reduced in scale and act upon Electra and Orestes with a bewildering capriciousness. Orestes, for example, learns from a supposedly infallible source, the God Apollo at Delphi, that he must slay his mother Clytemnestra. After the deed is done, it is explained to him that Apollo was wrong, and he must now atone. One thinks of Gloucester in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, So are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport." The production seemed to avoid all the faults of Richard III. There are very few characters, and no changes of scene; nothing checks the pressure of the terrible events, and that these events are known in advance, far from diminishing the power of the play, reinforces its striking power at a deeper level of the imagination, The cast, especially the Electra, were splendidly adequate to the towering action, and I would like to have known who they were; unfortunately, they were anonymous.

B.E.G.

M.