Michael Tanner

Thrills amid the gore

Elektra<br /> Royal Opera House For You<br /> Linbury Studio

issue 15 November 2008

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. There does come a point, now very familiar to frequenters of Ring productions, when ‘postmodern’ stagings in which characters from myth are domesticated and blatant discrepancies between text and action are indulged, where we are no longer stimulated into thinking anew about established masterworks, but left merely with a jumble of impressions and a damper on serious responding and thinking.

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