National Theatre’s new production stages a bold collision of eras in Electra/Persona, a two-part evening that pairs ancient Greek tragedy with 20th-century cinema. Directed by Benedict Andrews and starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, the work presents Sophocles’ story of familial vengeance alongside Ingmar Bergman’s modernist film about identity and breakdown.
Sophocles wrote Electra around 420 BC; its narrative of a daughter who seeks retribution for her father’s murder has been a staple of classical theatre for millennia. Ingmar Bergman‘s 1966 film Persona follows a psychiatric nurse, Alma, and an actress, Elisabeth, who collapses while performing the role of Electra. The National Theatre production places the two texts in dialogue, highlighting their shared concerns despite the 2,300-year gap.
Benedict Andrews has structured the evening with the pair presented before and after the interval, connected by what the company describes as a decisive coup de théâtre at the conclusion of the first half. Andrews has described Persona as “a pinnacle of modernist cinema” and emphasised the particular challenge of bringing a film that relies on camera, silence and close-up to the stage: “the face as a terrain.” He said rehearsals have clarified his reading of the combined-piece as a unified cycle of grief.
Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss headline a cast tasked with negotiating both the ritual intensity of ancient Greek performance and the introspective rigor of Bergman’s film. The production frames questions of performance, identity and mourning through theatrical and cinematic modes, aiming to make explicit the continuities between the sources while foregrounding the technical and interpretive demands of staging Persona alongside Electra. The run at the National Theatre is presented as an uncommon theatrical experiment linking two eras and artistic languages.
