Elektrafying: Belvoir’s Elektra / Orestes

In uncertain times, we often turn to myths and classic stories to help us make sense of what we are seeing in the world around us. Despite their age, the Greek tragedies still maintain their appeal, and perhaps more so than before, are currently experiencing a new breath of life in often radically-reimagined settings and versions. In the past year alone in Sydney, we have seen versions of Antigone, Phaedre, Oedipus Rex, with a version of the Oresteia still to come, no doubt among countless others. And while I’ve never really been a particular fan of the Greek plays, there is something in their cyclical nature, in the way they routinely invoke powers larger and more vengeful than anything we can imagine as humans that is intoxicating and affecting.

Enter Belvoir’s Elektra / Orestes, a kind of double-bill about two members of the house of Atreus, told with verve and boldness by Anne-Louise Sarks and Jada Alberts. Rather than a double-bill in the traditional theatrical sense – two plays in repertory, often playing back-to-back on one night – here we have the same story told from two different perspectives, literally from either side of a wall. In many ways – thematically, mythically – it is a companion to Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired from 2013: where that was first and foremost about people and relationships, Elektra / Orestes is about actions and consequences, and is a good old fashioned revenge tragedy.

We’ll go down together: Belvoir’s Brothers Wreck

This is not an easy play to write about. Nor should it be. Of all the subjects and issues which can and remain taboo in the contemporary world, it is two essential inviolable truths which remain the most potent and prohibitively awkward to discuss openly, honestly, truthfully: death, and sex. Yet, bizarrely, they are two constants, along with birth, which we all experience during our lives. As Leah Purcell writes in her director’s note, “death is a universal subject and this play will affect anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one, more so for those who have experienced the loss through suicide. And, in particular to this story, youth suicide – this act knows no colour, it touches us all. What this play asks is: how do people deal with death?” How do we talk about death, to each other, to ourselves, as individuals and as a society?

Before a production commences, I always try to read the program notes – not so much in the hope that they’ll explain what I am about to see, but so that like reading the introduction in a book, I am aware of the context or ideas in the piece. The hardest thing about reading Jada Alberts’ writer’s note is just how personal a story this is, how very much a part of her it is, and there is no disguising it nor apology made for the content of Brothers Wreck which unfolds here on Belvoir’s Upstairs stage.