Blanchett is the star attraction, but Hoss matches her beat for beat
Electra/Persona, as the title suggests, is a play of two halves — and the split serves it for better and for worse, writes Katie Kelly.
Electra nods to Sophocles’ tragedy of a daughter driven mad by grief and rage over her father’s murder; Persona to Ingmar Bergman’s avant-garde film, which the production attempts to fold into it. Why pair the two? By the end, I still wasn’t convinced the production had a good answer — a doubt worth holding onto for what follows.
Four actors share six roles between them. Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, the production’s two stars, are assigned their pairing by an audience member’s coin toss: either Electra and Elizabeth — an actress struck mute mid-performance and now in psychiatric care — or Clytemnestra, Electra’s mother, and Alma, the nurse treating Elizabeth. Carrying four roles between them across two hours, both actors are a feat of stamina as much as skill. Blanchett is the star attraction, but Hoss matches her beat for beat.
The first half stages Electra itself, and it’s the stronger of the two: Hoss has only seconds after the coin lands before exploding onto the stage in a howl of rage. The production finds real light amid the darkness too, Cate Blanchett hams up the ‘bad mother’ role in a few places to great effect, and gets some laughs alongside her persuasive grief. As the play ends, stagehands sweep away blood and broken props in full view, and one work dissolves into the next.
Persona opens with Elizabeth’s introduction to her wary nurse, Alma, and their relationship carries the next hour: one woman’s silence draws out the other’s relentless self-disclosure. The staging turns inventive here — Elizabeth retreats under a coat with a hidden camera, physically vanishing from view while her every expression is relayed to a screen above. It’s a sharp visual argument about the gap between the self we project and the self underneath. For all its intelligence, though, the production doesn’t know when to stop: two hours is too long even for this cast to sustain without the audience starting to fidget. The two halves share real thematic ground — mother-daughter entanglement chief among them — but the connection never quite convinces, and the clarity of the first half leaves the second struggling to compete.
Design carries real weight throughout — the staging inventive, the soundscape visceral. But the production as a whole is easier to admire than to feel: intellectually alive, only fitfully moving, and, for all its ambition, never quite captivating.
Lyttelton Theatre until 10 October 2026.
Booking and full details: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/electra-persona/
