Elektra: Brie Larson is no marvel in this messy production

There should be a support group for critically battered American stars who’ve made London debuts in duds. Sigourney Weaver’s panned Prospero looked like the last word in colourlessness. But hot on the heels of an impassive Rami Malek coming a cropper in Oedipus, now we have Brie Larson, best known for Captain Marvel on the big-screen, being less than marvellous as fiery Greek heroine Electra, who’s hell-bent on avenging her father’s murder at the hands of her mother Clytemnestra and the latter’s lover Aegisthus.

Larson certainly manifests a focus and commitment that suggests she wasn’t crazy to undertake the role, even if she falls short of previous luminaries (10 years ago we had Kristin Scott Thomas; a generation before that, Zoë Wanamaker).

The current wave of visiting Hollywood names seems drawn to unyielding, obstinate characters. One expects a degree of fixity, but for us to feel their predicament there’s got to be room for them to assert a living, breathing relatability. And Daniel Fish’s approach to Sophocles’ tragedy exemplifies an experimentalism that’s too constraining by half.

Fish, you might recall, is the American director who divisively reinvented Oklahoma! by stripping it to something unrecognisably harsh. Here again he opts for a bare-bones approach, placing emphasis on the text’s musicality (using a high-flown version by Canadian poet Anne Carson).

There’s little to delight the eye – a white screen offsets the black rear wall, a distracting blimp hovers above, while occasional squirted black liquid is a marring, jarring surrogate for blood. The main invitation is auditory, the six-strong female chorus conceived as a gown-wearing, mic-wielding spectacle in their own right, at times solemnly slow-turning on a revolve.

Fish, his composer (Ted Hearne) and others have been fastidious in making these witnesses sing or intone their commentary and advisories. It’s no mean feat to impart lines in unison and with due momentum, and it arguably honours the strictures of the ancient form, assisting a stark, ritualised atmosphere. But, as the classical scholar Oliver Taplin has noted, the drama has to be “human and various”, not a ritual in itself. And what gets confused swiftly is where our attention should fall. The problem of over-emphasis is redoubled by Larson’s jolting, forceful delivery into a microphone, sometimes with added distortion and with an almost tic-like need to amplify and draw out every use of the word “no”.

It’s a “No” from me to this capitalised approach. Restless and glowering, with her cropped hair, jeans and sleeveless t-shirt (bearing the slogan Bikini Kill) this striking Elektra has one foot in the modern era, the other in antiquity, but it feels like a quagmire, the impact subsiding as the short evening drags on. Patrick Vaill’s hangdog, testy Orestes and Greg Hicks’s grimacing, bare-chested Aegisthus seem curiously sidelined even when in full glare. The laurels go to Stockard Channing (Greece is the word…), giving us a Clytemnestra of stately bearing and stirring defensiveness and lending the pivotal mother-daughter battle an urgency, danger and truthfulness. No cathartic pity and terror, all told; just a crying shame.

Until April 12

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