Review by Simon Jenner, May 27th 2025
If you can find a ticket get to this. Anne Carson’s translations of Greek tragedy – like Antigone – have reframed many recent productions of the genre: those plays that wind up like remorseless clockwork over 75 minutes then snap. But no productions of Carson’s versions have actually spawned another. Till now. Director Conor Baum was so incensed with the butchery (pun intended) of a recent production of Carson’s fleet take of Sophocles Electra, he decided on the spot to produce his own. He helms it at BN1 Arts Studio till May 30th. Being Baum it’s both faithful and revelatory, remorseless yet clear to the last syllable.
Lexi Pickett as Electra and Ava Gypsy as Chorus . Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Following Baum’s Festival Homestead at BOAT last year (a Midwest take on Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba) you’d hope that Baum and other outstanding directors (and writers) like Sam Chittenden might be supported in the main Festival itself. Baum though decided late, and both directors enjoy flexibility. And Baum will return to BOAT with Tennessee William’s Suddenly Last Summer in two months.
But make no mistake, this (like Chittenden’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) is Festival-standard; even in the slightly less-than-ideal sightlines of BN1 Arts in New England Road. There’s just a stark blue-grey set (like lighting and costumes all designed by Baum), a central doorway: Electra is besmirched, Orestes is travel-dusted. Others are sober or resplendent: self-preening in flowers, jewels or braces. There’s some baskets, an urn. Nothing else is needed. Noon beats down remorselessly.
In fact Baum’s brought a little Homestead with him, setting it in a kind of 20th century no-place, all braces and swishes. And there’s reason: Eugene O’Neill’s superb take on Electra, Mourning Becomes Electra, from 1931 set just after the Civil War, has more backstory; but there’s kinship here. Baum and Carson though plunge straight in and the end is extraordinary too. We forget where the original ends (there’s often a bit tacked on) and the virtue of this production reminds you how stark, how brief and how broodingly tense this is.
Though we start with men, the five women in the eight-strong cast dominate. Ethan McHale’s Orestes makes an impact to begin, full of angst, doubt and an undelivered lightning-bolt of fury: he’s come to avenge his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus’s murder of his father Agamemnon. In the final scenes his bloody work’s released and forked vengeance finds its ground. But he has to hide till over two-thirds of the way through (there’s a great scene with sister Electra), urged on by Tim Swinton’s assured Pedagogus. Pedagogus is also able to deliver the fake news that Orestes has died in a Delphic chariot race, to reassure his mother she won’t face revenge. Swinton’s particularly good at suggesting a guileless truth-teller, an academic sort not capable of plot: till he’s alone with conspirators. The House of Atreus isn’t a happy one.
Madeleine Schofield as Chrysothemis. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Christine Kempell gleams with pleasured malice as Clytemnestra, and her robes shimmer with it as she twists past her daughter, shivering with anticipation: she intends to wall up Electra for good, in the ground. But as she reminds Electra, she was avenging the ritual slaughter of her eldest daughter Iphigenia, to propitiate the Greek sack of Troy: since Neptune wouldn’t let them sail. Agamemnon was avenging a wrong done to his hapless brother, Menelaus. His wife Helen’s was “abducted” or eloped. So why not one of their children? Good point.
Her lover Jonathan Howlett’s Aegisthus ripples with Alpha arrogance, is bold and doesn’t lack dignity or a sense of fate as he’s ushered into it, almost with calm acceptance.
This though is primarily about how women wait to be released from stasis by men: Ava Gypsy with youthful ardour and Sharon Drain with tremendous affect and gravitas urge on and counsel Electra – and others – as the two Chorus. Clearly on the side of justice, they take on supernatural prophesy “Foresight” they declaim, putting them at one with Pedagogus and his strategies. Their unnamed roles are larger than “chorus’ might suggest. They amplify, empathise, impel.
Sharon Drain and Lexi Pickett. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Ethan McHale and Lexi Pickett. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Madeleine Schofield’s sympathetic but pacific Chrysothemis is iridescent, gleaming as her mother but loyal in her own way to her sister. Bedecked with flowers and bows, which she occasionally offloads, she’s the voice of ordinary reasons: as with Antigone, there’s a ‘normal’ sister who just wants love, marriage, the good life. But Schofield manages to render her both warm yet scornful. Bedecked like a business influencer (though not quite contemporary) she mainlines a little of her mother’s briskness. This isn’t a wilting Chrysothemis, but one charting her life. And her sudden conviction that Orestes is alive, her fierce joy, however soon dashed (wrongly, in fact) shows heart.
All though hinges on Chrysothemis’ sister. As Electra Lexi Pickett rises up from dust and falls back there (there’s sightline issue, and I just stood up at the back). But Pickett judders with almost extinguished hope, leads a posthumous life almost as a brief on the subcontinent waiting for the conflagration of Sutti, or a husband’s funeral pyre. Electra’s obsession with Orestes is about one kind of release, but there’s almost a sexual one too. In some versions it ends with a release from life (as in Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra) at the end; as if nothing else can succeed it; though (spoiler!) Orestes will be pursued by Furies for a bit.
Tim Swinton as Pedagogus and Ensemble. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Jonathan Howlett. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Pickett though erupts from another place altogether. Vocally they’re tremendous, smouldering and yet controlled, from hiss to clarion call. Whether lambasting or scorning a mother, or sister, Pickett’s venom is implacable, just like Antigone: Electra is the conscience of the house and a ragged Pickett embodies this in smuts and smudges. Scorned and adamantine as they rise and turn: nothing in their body is hurried; a furious sibyl. There is release but it won’t be death, or even love, but as Pickett twists in grief over the supposed urn of Orestes, the sudden recognition of McHale’s Orestes is the first shock of what will come. The two actors overwhelm; and Pickett raises their grimed head shining with exaltation, like sun through storm-clouds.
The end is set. Baum directs that ratcheting-up inexorably: never hurried, never static. The audience holds its breath. So will you. Outstanding.
Lexi Pickett and christine Kempell. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
