Among the ancient tragedies centring on the house of Atreus, Euripides’ Electra stands apart in its setting, tonal shifts, religious scepticism and its reimagination of characters and plot. R.'s new volume provides a thorough and thought-provoking overview of the play as part of the series Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. As a ‘companion’, the book advances no major interpretation or argument, but it excels at providing readers with the grounding necessary to appreciate the play and work with it further.
R.'s expertise in both Theatre and Classics means that there is much to be gained for readers coming from either field. Classicists may perceive, however, that the book was not written primarily for them. The Bloomsbury Companion series aims at accessibility, so there is little Greek, and the few words that appear are transliterated. Some notes illuminate details that may seem elementary to Classicists, including that theos stands behind English ‘theology’ (p. 104) and that Polydeuces is also known as Pollux (p. 142 n. 38). At times, this Classicist reviewer really missed more engagement with the Greek, as for example in case of R.'s exploration of colour terminology (pp. 65–6), especially given how ancients categorised colour so differently than we do. But the benefit for non-readers of Greek is clear: the jargon-free prose makes subtle insights available to a wide range of readers.
Classicists will find value, however, both in the concise analysis of Electra grounded in the scholarship and in the insights R. brings from his experience as a director and translator. He presents the play with sensitivity to the ways in which both ancient and modern performance spaces, conventions and styles can inform historical and literary interpretation. Perhaps the best example of this is his discussion of Aegisthus’ body as a prop and whether the head was removed or left attached (pp. 85–90). R. interweaves analysis of the role of the Perseus myth in the play and the realities of an actor delivering a monologue to a corpse to argue persuasively (but not polemically) that the scene works better if Electra can hold Aegisthus’ head, and supports this argument with a photo from his own staging. R. also compares the possibilities and techniques of ancient and modern staging and acting techniques (e.g. an actor's psychological commitment, p. 48); such discussions will help the non-theatrically inclined Classicist to ground their analyses in performative practices.
After a brief introduction, which exhorts us to keep the play itself as the central object of study, R.'s first chapter provides a clear and concise introduction to ancient theatre's basic context and conventions, suitable as an introduction in an ancient drama course or for actors new to Greek tragedy. The chapter's second half focuses on the tragedy's literary context, highlighting both Euripides’ biography and tragedy's place in Athenian performance culture.
The second chapter moves carefully through the plot, establishing ‘What Happens and How’. While this summary may be less helpful for those who already know the play well, R.'s methodology (rooted in B. Brecht's Lehrstücke) eschews ancient theatrical terminology and instead divides the play into ‘movements’ and titled sections of those movements. This approach provides a model to understand better how the parts of a tragedy contribute to the whole. While one might quibble with R.'s specific delineations, the process underscores how R.'s summary is in fact an interpretation.
Chapter 3, ‘Reflecting and Re-fashioning Tradition’, does the important work of helping establish the play's intertextual relationships, most especially with Aeschylus’ Oresteia, but also Homer and, tentatively, Sophocles. Even those familiar with those obvious engagements will find subtler points to take in, including the treatments of earthbound fertility and divine intervention.
The fourth chapter, the book's longest, treats all the characters individually. After rejecting any psycho-analysable interiority apart from characters’ actions and statements, R. outlines each character's traits and inconsistencies, including Electra's erratic performances, Orestes’ incessant questioning, the farmer's humility and decency, and Clytemnestra's complexity and heart. While the chapter will be most useful for actors and directors, scholars may still find R.'s interpretation and collocation of evidence about the characters useful.
Chapter 5, ‘Language’, attempts to provide the non-specialist with a taste of how Euripides’ word choices work. R.'s analysis is limited by the distance he keeps from the Greek, but he provides a few illustrative examples (skula and charin) and analyses the ways in which characters reinterpret these words across the play. The rest of the chapter consists of lists that help spotlight recurrent themes and patterns: lists of colour terms, close repetitions, words evoking a theme (e.g. marriage) and aphorisms. The chief gain for those without Greek is R.'s attention to subtleties of word choice (e.g. phonos rather than haima to describe blood).
In Chapter 6, ‘Setting, Costumes, Props, and Bodies’, R.'s experience as a director comes to the fore. For scholars more accustomed to text than stage, the attention this chapter brings to the visual elements of performance will be immensely valuable. R. draws careful attention to the ways in which the text evokes, supplements and creates tension with the visual elements, and he also draws readers’ attention to some performance challenges. The old man brings a sheep in to be slaughtered. R. rightfully asks us to consider: is it removed? When? How might its presence or absence augment or complicate the play's repeated sacrificial imagery?
Chapters 7 and 8 both trace the play's major themes. The seventh chapter focuses on gender roles, including Electra's paradoxical status as the virgin wife and the sexual dynamics implicit in her relationship with Aegisthus, Clytemnestra and eventually Pylades. The eighth chapter weaves together three meditations on high and low status: wealth, divinity and physical space. Here R. carefully explores the way in which Euripides’ characters (if not the playwright) destabilise normative expectations about divinity, truth and goodness. The brevity of these chapters means that they are necessarily only introductions to these rich topics, but they are evocative introductions, and the bibliography in the endnotes supports deeper dives.
The book's final chapter provides a brief survey of Electra's reception. The treatment includes the impact of Gilbert Murray's translations, and surveys productions by K. Tsianos and I. Van Hove, and adaptations by R. Jeffers, E. O'Neill, J. Giraudoux, M. Youcenar and M. Cacoyannis. In the fourteen-page chapter much must have been cut for space, but I found myself wanting more on film adaptations including Electra, My Love and The Forgotten Pistolero.
One can, of course, find quibbles with any project. R. suggests that there is something paradoxical in the representation of Aegisthus as both a seductive adulterer and an effeminate (p. 100 and elsewhere), a collocation that was a commonplace, not a contradiction, in ancient Athens. R.'s brief treatment of iambic trimeter (pp. 130–1, n. 9) confusingly blends English practice (alternation of syllable stress) with Greek practice (alternation of syllable length or weight). The use of endnotes, while perhaps less intimidating to non-academics, makes many fascinating and important points less likely to be read. Important notes about the interplay between modern stage design and the verbal elements of plays (p. 145 n. 1) and the slippage of the term prosopon between ‘face’ and ‘mask’ (p. 149 n. 33) are too easily missed. But these minor complaints do not undermine the quality of the work as a whole. The text is also remarkably clean of typographical errors.
Euripides’ Electra will likely always stand in the Oresteia's shadow. R., however, takes special care to illustrate the contemporary relevance of the play, from its concern with gender dynamics (p. 100) to the (dysfunctional) relationship between wealth and morality (p. 103), and even humanity as drivers of climate change (p. 112). For those interested in the play, whether they be teachers or researchers hoping for a refresher, students or enthusiasts looking for a crash course, or actors or directors aiming to stage a production, R. provides a wonderfully helpful starting point.
