Claire Allfree — Theater Critic

Echoes between both works reverberate – Alma and Elisabet cradle each other, as do Clytemnestra and Electra; the odd line is repeated. Both Electra and Elisabet have withdrawn from themselves because the horror of the world is too much – the unstoppable cycle of violence for Electra, the senselessness of war for Elisabet (Andrews replaces Vietnam with the Middle East). One is estranged from her mother, the other from her daughter. Both struggle to find a way of being that feels both reasonable and true.

Intriguingly, McPherson admits in a programme note that he initially conceived of his script as a conversation taking place around a kitchen table with minimal props, leaving it to the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. How one wishes that a way could have been found to make this daring idea happen. Instead we are left with a mediocre half-way house, neither theatrically coherent nor, alas, a patch on the far superior films.

Intriguingly, McPherson admits in a programme note that he initially conceived of his script as a conversation taking place around a kitchen table with minimal props, leaving it to the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. How one wishes that a way could have been found to make this daring idea happen. Instead we are left with a mediocre half-way house, neither theatrically coherent nor, alas, a patch on the far superior films.

We see Sarandon first at the dinner table with what turns out to be Mary’s third husband, her deceptively artless performance at once sexy, tricky, playful, effortlessly lived in. There is a hint, also, of past crisis – a hallmark of Letts’s non-chronological format, which lets slip little shards of information that only later make sense. She is also terrific a few scenes later in a hospital ward, reckoning with a life’s pile-up of failures with battle-hardened humour, and refusing to sugar-coat the fact she is dying.

Several key characters, including the mighty Titans and Hercules’s dim but loyal equine friend Pegasus, have been excised. Panic and Pain, the demonic shapeshifters on team Hades, are now a couple of deadbeat blokes called Bob and Charles. The irritable satyr Philoctetes is now a world weary, very human waiter. Most unforgivably for the film’s fans, Hades struts about in a blingy frock coat rather than shimmering in a haze of icy blue fire.