Sophocles Electra

Electra by Sophocles is a tragedy that focuses very singularly on grief and its effects. It concerns the attempts of Electra, (Kristen Scott-Thomas), to avenge her father Agamemnon by killing her mother Clytemnestra (Diana Quick) with the advice of the virgins of the palace and her sister Crysothemis (Cait Davis), and the help of her long lost brother Orestes (Jack Lowden). The tragedy has little subtext and makes very obvious the feelings of the characters. This takes away from some subtleties of contemporary theatre, but puts in unparalleled and unnerving focus the grief and pain of Electra that entirely consumes and controls her, taking away her identity and replacing it with the manifestation of a single overbearing emotion and this creates

Here Clytemnestra looked down on Electra, chastising her coldly for her dogged obsession with her father and her inability to get over his death, explaining that what she did was simple maternalistic instinct as it was motivated by the loss of her daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice performed by Agamemnon. Though this explanation is questionable Clytemnestra’s sad and regretful tone suggested at least a degree of genuine emotion and pain at the loss of her daughter. However Electra remained devoutly unchanged after this explanation and angrily chastised her mother, claiming that it was because of sexual desire and greed that she killed her father. This ignorance and cold refusal to even consider any other arguments shows how Scott Thomas’ Electra’s obsessive grief had made her illogical and incapable of human rational thought. Instead I felt like it had driven her to wild extremes that appeared more animal than human.

The distortion and manipulation of Electra’s emotions by grief is brought to climax at the news of her brothers’ death. She reached out and took the supposed ashes of Orestes, slowly cuddling them like a mother cuddles a baby. She looked to this urn and talked to it like it was a child. This emphatic personification that Scott Thomas’ Electra is absorbed by highlights the effect that her grief has on her emotional balance. She has become so depraved and emotionally starved that even an urn of ash becomes a baby for her to