Sophokles’s Elektra promises electrifying start to New Year in Brighton

It plays the Theatre Royal Brighton from Monday to Saturday, January 13-18 before the production moves to Duke of York’s Theatre in London for an 11-week season from Friday, January 24. The cast includes Brie Larson (Room, Lessons in Chemistry, Captain Marvel), who will be making her West End debut and Stockard Channing (The West Wing, The Good Wife).

Straight Greek tragedy doesn't seem to be mounted so very much these days, but as Greg says: “For some strange alchemic reason we're seeing a lot of them all at once at the moment, two productions of Oedipus, one of Antigone and now this one coming up. There must be something in the spiritual zeitgeist at the moment, and I think what it is is that there is a real hunger for authenticity of feeling and a real desire to explore what is really necessary in the human dynamic. At the moment it's all so confusing finding the real track in life. We are all so diverted by so many different artificial imperatives. But in this play the imperatives are anything but artificial. It is about what utterly needs to be done. It is about what is really necessary. There is no escaping that and there is no particular aesthetic in that. It's a deep, deep dive. It is a play about somebody that simply cannot not grieve and that's what she says and that's what impels her and that's the most fundamental thing.”

Elektra, haunted by her father's assassination, is consumed by grief; a need for survival; and a thirst for vengeance. When her long lost brother Orestes at last returns, she urges him to a savage and terrifying conclusion but at what cost?

“The Greeks believed that you had to love your destiny because if you didn't love it there was nothing you could do about it. You had to go with your destiny. You had to embrace it. You had no choice. It’s just the way things were and they believed that it was worse if you resisted what your destiny was always going to be. But the Greeks also believe very much in balancing something against something else. If someone was killed then there had to be revenge if that killing was not justified.

“And that's the thing. For some reason there is a real hunger to see these plays that were written so long ago but still have a great cathartic effect. The production is very precise in its vision. It is utterly text based. Daniel Fish, our amazing director, has really wanted to unearth the play through the language of the play. Whatever the surrounding aesthetics, they are all there to support the text and this is an amazing adaptation by Anne Carson who has managed to make it both ancient and modern in one fell moment. There is a fantastic modern resonance to it but it's also absolutely true to the original – and it is totally wild. The nervous energy in the play is so intense that at times it is almost unbearable.”