Electra
by Tom Mcgrath

Electra Book Cover
Electra Cover

Highlights

British

Synopsis

As a dramatist, Tom McGrath's great strength is to pare things down to the fewest possible words, the sparsest settings, only the most elemental action.

His extraordinary stroke with Electra is to seize on the brevities of Greek tragedy and whittle them down even further.

The result: a lethal little piece, bristling with menacing meanings and consequences, representing a total minefield.

We watch in horror as the characters blunder through it.

His Electra is self-righteously correct, mad and disastrous.

His Orestes, rather than god-enlightened, is a hesitant teenager blinded by a vision of new beginnings.

All the characters have a dubious mixture of self-deluding, self-interested and high-minded motives.

All are fatally credulous, believing messengers and messages even less reliably credentialed than CNN, Fox or the BBC.

This piece zings with more compressed meaning than many ten times its length.

It resonates powerfully for all of us watching similar stories unfolding in the Middle East, Congo, Rwanda, the USA and Northern Ireland.

- Bob Tait, theatre reviewer and literary critic.

Publication

Year Published
2003
ISBN 10
0954962524
ISBN 13
9780954962524
Print Length
44 pages
Language
English
Print
Electra is a British play written by and published by Capercaille Books in 2003. The print edition has an ISBN-13 of 9780954962524 and an ISBN-10 of 0954962524.
Digital
ePlay digital editions are available on Amazon Kindle.

Rating

4 out of 5

from 1 rating and 1 review

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