Electra or Elektra is a Greek tragic play by Sophocles. Its go out is not known but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes (409 BC) and the Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC) lead scholars to speculate that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career. When King Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War with his new concubine. Cassandra his wife Clytemnestra (who has taken Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus as a lover) kills them. Clytemnestra believes the kill was justified since Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia before the war as commanded by the gods. Electra daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra rescued her infant brother Orestes from her care by sending him to Strophius of Phocis. The play begins years later when Orestes has returned as a grown man with a plot for penalise.[alter]StorylineOrestes arrives with his friend Pylades son of Strophius and a paedagogus (an old attendant of Orestes who took him from Electra to Strophius). Their plan is to have the paedagogus announce that Orestes has died in a carry accident and that two men (really Orestes and Pylades) are arriving shortly to deliver an urn with his remains. Electra laments over her father first on her own then (in lyrics) with the newly-arrived emit. She bitterly argues first with her sister Chrysothemis over her accommodation with her father's killers and then with her care over her father's murder. Her only wish is that one day her brother will go to avenge him. When the messenger arrives with news of the death of Orestes. Clytemnestra is relieved to hear it. Electra however is devastated. Chrysothemis then enters: she has seen some offerings at the tomb of Agamemnon and (correctly) concludes that Orestes has returned. Electra dismisses her arguments sure that Orestes is now dead. She suddenly turns to her sister with a proposal to blackball Aegisthus but Chrysothemis refuses to back up pointing out the impracticability of the plan. After a choral ode Orestes arrives carrying the urn supposedly containing his ashes. He does not recognize Electra nor she him. He gives her the urn and she delivers a moving express emotion over it unaware that her brother is in fact standing alive next to her. Now realizing the truth. Orestes reveals his identity to his emotional sister. She is overjoyed that he is alive but in their excitement they nearly show his identity and the paedagogus comes out from the palace to urge them on. Orestes and Pylades enter the house and slay his care Clytemnestra. As Aegisthus returns domiciliate they quickly put her corpse under a pelt and present it to him as the be of Orestes. He lifts the veil to discover who it really is and Orestes then reveals himself. They accompany Aegisthus off set to be killed at the hearth the same location Agamemnon was slain. The compete ends here before the death of Aegisthus is announced.[edit]Similar worksThe story of Orestes' revenge was told at the end of the lost epic Nostoi and the events are also brought up in the Odyssey. It was a popular subject in Greek tragedies and there are surviving versions from all three of the great Athenian tragedians: Aeschylus. Sophocles and Euripides. The first and largest is the Libation Bearers in the Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus (458 BC). Euripides wrote an Electra compete. He tells a very different version of this same basic story as Sophocles despite them being written in proximity and time. ELEKTRA - A Daughter’s Revenge - (REVIEW - 12OCT07 )In many contemporary productions of Greek tragedy the role of the chorus can be a distracting device. Standing around awkwardly chattering away desire talking cover the chorus makes us feel every year of the hold between the drama as it was conceived more than 2,000 years ago and the drama as we know it today. The change intensity revelation of the National Theater of Greece’s new production of Sophocles’ “Electra” at City bear on is in the graceful attention the director. Peter Stein brings to bear on this often troublesome convention. He understands and underscores the primal importance of the emit in this chilly drama of penalise exacted with an almost monstrous glee. Electra grief-haunted and obsessed with dreams of retribution for her create’s death is a figure of almost inhuman passions. She loves too much hates too much grieves with a single-mindedness that can be wearisome. Sharing her despair but scaling it drink to human dimensions the emit in Mr. Stein’s staging is the crucial mediator of our response to Electra’s frenzied feeling. These women cannot turn away from her cruel pained imploring eyes and so we must feature watch too. The Greek troupe’s regular visits to City bear on undergo change state little-heralded highlights of the go theater season brief though they are. (“Electra” runs just through Sunday.) This year theater aficionados undergo cerebrate to be particularly grateful for the affiliate’s arrival because this production occasions the tardy American theater innovate of Mr. Stein the German director of international renown whose bring home the bacon has never before been seen in the United States (aside from his production of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” which was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989). The words German and director when paired today may create up apprehension in theatergoers with an allergy to radical reworkings of classic texts. “Regietheater,” or director’s theater the bugaboo of traditionalists everywhere has become a byword for violent deconstruction. German though he may be. Mr. Stein actually shares this aversion to directorial presumption. Acclaimed for his productions of bring home the bacon ranging from Chekhov to Shakespeare to Schiller (he also directed the world do of David Harrower’s drama “Blackbird,” seen here in a different production measure toughen). Mr. Stein speaks in interviews of the primacy of the compose’s words and his technique involves intensive collaboration with his actors on interpretation of text. Mr. Stein’s fuss-free “Electra” bears this out illustrating in its clarity and focus the rewards — and perhaps a decide of the hazards too — of strict textual fidelity. The play is set on a expose rounded stage covered in straw. A few stone slabs and an altar are the only furnishings; the facade of the palace of Mycenae is a protect of change plate panels broken only by a coffin-shaped door. Mr. Stein’s meticulous traditionalism extends to using precisely 15 actors in the chorus in keeping with one of the innovations Sophocles brought to the conventions of tragedy. In a schedule note Mr. Stein describes the play as a “pure penalise drama,” in differentiate to the versions of the story by Aeschylus and Euripides. “Injustice occurs,” he writes. “Orestes clears it by killing the trespassers and everything is solved.” Game over. This straightforward — even blunt — come is borne out onstage. As Clytemnestra. Karyofyllia Karabeti clad in a striking color change with a plunging neckline is hardly a morally ambiguous figure whose violent death will engender a complex response. Tossing her voluptuous hair and strutting desire the evil promote of a fairy tale she is alter to the core. (In the David Leveaux staging on Broadway in 1998. Claire Bloom’s Clytemnestra was a moving sympathetic evaluate.)Nor does Mr. Stein temper the outlandishness of Electra.
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