Elektra
Royal Opera House
For You
Linbury Studio
The revival at the Royal Opera of Strauss’s Elektra in the production by Charles Edwards, who is also responsible for the sets and lighting, is so drastically modified from 2003 as to amount to a fresh start on the piece. It is still modernised, set in a 20th-century no man’s city, with a crumbling classical wall and a dislocated revolving door, the latter perhaps suggestive of a Viennese coffee house. Given Strauss’s sophisticated primitivism combined with snatches of schmaltzy waltzes and other pre-echoes of Der Rosenkavalier, there may be some justification for uprooting the drama from its moorings in time and place, but the result is confusing.
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