Elektra/Orestes | The Hive Collective

Image + cover image: Stephen Henry

Elektra/Orestes is Hive Collective’s modern adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles Electra, a story about complicated family relations and difficult moral questions. I found this production too over-dramatic to be enjoyable, but if you are the overthinking kind of person, it does offer some chewy food for thought.

The show opened with a very dramatic music, dim lighting, and the dark figure of Elektra dressed in black rocking back and forth. This was an unsettling opening that threw me deep into the sorrow of Elektra, just then to be presented with a petulant, self-righteous, and manipulative character dressed in typical gen Z fashion: black baggy dress, black t-shirt, black socks, black short Docs. All that Elektra wanted was revenge for the death of her father killed by her mother, Clytemnestra, and her new husband, Aegisthus. Up to here, I could still empathise with an insufferable Elektra who was peevish because she was grieving.

Image: Stephen Henry

Peeled one layer of the onion, and my empathy for Elektra was soon gone. We found that Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon, Elektra’s father because he killed their first daughter and was an abusive man. Clytemnestra describes Agamemnon as a loving man when he was in a good mood, and a fury when he was not. Classical abusive partner. But blinded with her self-righteousness and desire for revenge, Elektra did not care or could not see her mother’s suffering and the difficult choices that she had to make to protect herself and her children. Clytemnestra came across as a woman who had to compromise a lot of herself and her values to maintain some form of order in her and her children’s life.

Peeled another layer of the onion, and we found that Kyrsothemis, Elektra’s sister who was doing her best to assist her mother, contain the passions of Elektra, and carry on with her life, was having an affair with Aegisthus, her mother’s new husband. There are no morally pure characters in this play, and this is what makes it all too human. One by one, the characters revealed their compromised moral positions adapted to fit the uncomfortable shapes of life.

Image: Stephen Henry

The mise-en-scène worked really well to convey the deception and plotting that propelled the story from behind the scene. The play was divided into two acts which staged the same scene but from two different rooms: first, the story was told from the living room, and then, the knots were unravelled from the perspective of the kitchen. I thought that the microphone effects worked really well to produce the conversations that happened in the other room. However, the stage changeover from the living room to the kitchen left me puzzled and perplexed. At the end of the first act, all the characters came on stage dressed in industrial workwear and rearranged the furniture while moving robotically.

I was left wondering why the Hive Collective chose to reinterpret Elektra at this particular point in time. Was is some sort of sentimental nostalgia for the past? Or was it a show off of virtuosity or culturalism? How does ancient Greek drama speak to modern Australia? And who is the audience of this play? I believe that there is a wealth of more compelling stories that are geographically and temporally closer to Australia that theatre can tell right now.

But then I am reminded that only a few weeks ago, La Boite showed Naked and Screaming, another play about complicated family relations, and I am led to believe that local theatre producers are calling attention onto the idealisation of the family and family life in Brisbane-ville. To me, Elektra/Orestes highlighted complex family relations, and in particular fraught mother-daughter relations. After all, Sophocles’ Electra inspired Carl Jung’s Electra complex, a psychoanalytical term to describe a girl’s attachment to the mother marked by a sense of competition over the father’s love and attention. The play also made me reflect on the dangers of self-righteousness and the malaise caused by the inability to put oneself in the shoes of others. Elektra was led to torment and eventually kill her mother in the name of her uncompromising position.