It begins with the coin toss. Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, two titans of cinema, both dressed in black with their blonde hair scraped back, leaving it to chance each night who will play the vengeful daughter Electra and who her murderous mother Clytemnestra. “I can’t tell where she ends and you begin,” remarks Ella Lily Hyland as Electra’s sister. Over the Electra/Persona’s interval-less two hours, the audience will lose track too.
The roles we assume and the similarities we share even with those who seem diametrically opposed to us are the central conceit of this new production by Benedict Andrews. The first half of this re-imagining plays on the well-known Sophocles tragedy of a family caught in a cycle of bloodshed: a mother who killed her husband in revenge for killing their daughter; a different daughter determined to make her mother pay. The second is an interpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, about an actress who refuses to speak and the mental health nurse tasked with her care. The tangential link? The actress fell silent while performing the role of Electra. Other connections between these two very different artistic classics are open for interpretation.
Hoss and Blanchett, who starred together as spouses in the 2023 film Tár, are mesmerising to watch close-up. On Magda Willi’s barren set – a mountain of exposed pine steps that can be a palace, a hospital, a beach – they trade barbs and identities with ferocious intensity. Murders are re-enacted using old jackets as props or committed anew by spitting blood across the stage. Tension, by turns maternal and erotic, is built up to excruciating heights. Themes ebb and flow into each other: grief, love, meta-theatre, familial duty, the trauma of motherhood, the lies that make us who we are. In the second half, Hoss (now playing the mute actress Elisabeth – if that’s the way the coin falls) gazes into a hand-held camera, every minute flicker of expression blown up in high definition on a screen for the audience to dissect. Blanchett as the nurse carries the momentum, with a spiralling monologue of observations and confessions that leave her as vulnerable as her patient. To be watched is to be violated, we are told, while watching both women’s mental breakdowns moment by moment.
“Persona” is Latin for mask – and a device frequently reached for in this show, from the white clay the actors in Electra spread on their faces before assuming their ancient roles, to the multi-layered selves the actress and her nurse construct. You can catch glimpses the ideas that inspired Andrews to pair these works together, and to cast actors alike enough in both looks and raw theatrical power to be able to switch parts. Alas, the concept doesn’t hold together: each half is impressive and emotionally harrowing in its own way, but the gulf between Greek tragedy and experimental mid-century cinema is too great. Still, it is something to see two masters of their craft creating something new like this – even if it is something neither Sophocles nor Bergman would recognise.
Electra/Pe3rson is on at the National Theatre, London SE1 until 21 November
[Further reading: The best of the Edinburgh Fringe]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 10 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The World According To Ed
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment