Elektra

An interview with director Ulrich Rasche by dramaturg Stephan Müller

Stephan Müller: You have a reputation as a scenographer for building monumental machines for the performers to inhabit. For this you use huge theatrical turntables, lifting platforms and conveyor belts on which the performers walk and chant in rhythm (sometimes even attached with ropes). How did you use your directing principles for Elektra?

Ulrich Rasche: As in our work in spoken theatre, the singers will also move in this opera throughout this production on two rotating discs. The combination of speech, movement, space and light is central. In spoken theatre, we infer the movement of the steps from the rhythmic pattern of the text and the meaning attached to it. In opera, the music helps us to define the dynamics of the movements. Strauss himself studied the language of Hofmannsthal closely and transposed it into music. It is amazing how precisely he draws inspiration from the syntax of sentences and their spoken melody.

SM: The decor for Elektra is from the play staged in Munich. The space will be completed by an orbital platform that will pass around the central disc. Why did you make this extension?

UR: As in Munich, a tower stands centre stage in Geneva. This steel construction, covered with a perforated sheet, is transparent or opaque depending on the lighting. The tower constitutes the real space in which the three female protagonists of the opera seem to be caught in an endless spiral. As the discs continuously rotate, the characters turn incessantly in circles. Thanks to a very precise mechanical system of rotations, movement and lifting of the elements of the set, there are multitude of places and situations in which Electra, Chrysothemis and Clytemnestra settle their conflicts. Even if it seems at times that one character has a more dominant position over the others, thanks to specific configurations of the staging elements, all the characters are caught in the mechanism of the machine: no one can escape the curse of the home, the cycle of murder and revenge. The second disc built for Geneva is above all a place for servants and valets. This vertical axis highlights the hierarchies and dependencies within the system.

SM: The portrayal of women about a hundred years ago was different from that of our time. Performers today see Strauss/Hofmannsthal's Elektra as an expression of a ‘hidden contempt for women’. We infer patriarchy, a denigration of the feminine. In a radical interpretation, Elektra would be outright ‘put to death by music and offered to the public as a female victim’. I see the Strauss/Hofmannsthal project as one showing a deep complicity with Electra; the audience should identify with the title character.

UR: Our view of the characters in Elektra can be empathetic or more distantly exhilarating. In the first case, we feel involved with the characters. We suffer as they suffer. In the second case, we revel or even rejoice in the suffering of women exposed to their fate. Of course, we look today at the play with different eyes than those of a hundred years ago. Our reading is conditioned by the ideology of each era and by preconceived judgments. But I don't mean that Hofmannsthal nor Strauss indulged in a ‘misogynistic leaning’.

SM: There is also a breakdown in the political order in Elektra. After the murder of King Agamemnon, Mycenae begins to crumble. There is no succession to the throne or continuity of monarchical power. Aeschylus' Oresteia continues the Elektra story whereby a new political order emerges: democracy.

UR: In Oresteia, the consistent crises of the political order lead in the end to change. The two-headed system, with gods and an upper class that decide everything, dissolves and is replaced by the ‘government of the people’. The tenement of democracy is universal participation in the question of what is the right social order. It is important to me that we see a critique of political relations in our Elektra, a critique of the domination that destroys human beings. Today, we must preserve ‘the invention of democracy’ against all challenges - from right-wing populism, conspiracy theorists and other extreme ideologies.