Oedipus at Colonus/Electra review – a double shot of Sophocles in Sicily

Concurrent London productions recently presented Oedipus as a modern politician pledging a new start (Mark Strong in the West End) and as a distant detective investigating a climate catastrophe that jeopardises Thebans' future (Rami Malek at the Old Vic).
Sophocles' late play Oedipus at Colonus, less commonly known, looks not ahead but backwards. This elegiac tragedy finds the exile reaching the end of his life. The 5,000-strong audience at Syracuse's ancient outdoor theatre hear Giuseppe Sartori's barefoot Oedipus before they see him. His wooden staff strikes the steps as he descends among us, down to the front row and on to a stage populated by trees that thicken the woodland around the theatre. 'It seems this place is sacred,' announces Antigone (Fotinì Peluso) at the wanderer's side. That goes for this Sicilian playing space as well as the drama's setting of Colonus, near Athens.
Physically frail, Oedipus is approaching his resting place, yet Sartori strikingly shows us a man who steadily grows stronger not weaker in the face of death. Aside from the dependable Theseus (Massimo Nicolini), the inhabitants of Colonus recoil at his arrival, not just because he traipses across the forbidden ground of the Eumenides. Without even introducing himself, his stain is apparent. One local desperately cleans the dirty footprints this ragged stranger leaves behind him.
In the play, Oedipus makes sense of, or rather comes to terms with, a past that is unspeakable – literally so, when he begs not to retread the horrific revelations about his parents. Sartori clutches his cloak around himself, as if covering his modesty, only to reveal a bare chest as the events of the earlier tragedy are unpicked. He discovers that he wields a power in choosing the place of his death and can control the outcome of the battle between his sons. But the play's most affecting conflict is internal, as Oedipus finds peace with himself and the staff is tossed to one side: 'I did what I did unknowingly.'
Healing and a sense of purification are at the heart of Canadian Robert Carsen's taut production using Francesco Morosi's emotionally direct translation for this season, where plays are performed in Italian with other languages available to audiences via earpieces. Jugs of water are ritually emptied in the orchestra, the space between stage and audience, by the chorus. Or rather, by one of the choruses. As well as the turbulent pack of white-suited men, a sisterhood in verdant gowns arrive to deliver a speech signalling the radiant beauty of Colonus, their words spoken as if intoxicated by its beauty and their bodies posed to evoke green shoots of renewal. The women, too, are given Sophocles' painful yet moving assessment of the inescapability of suffering and death. Only the decision to lend Oedipus some of their choreography strikes an odd note that weakens the mysterious, secretive quality of his transformative death.
Carsen balances the contrasting paces of a play which, with the scheme hatched by Creon (a suavely malevolent Paolo Mazzarelli), momentarily grips like a thriller amid the heavily reflective pronouncements. 'Time sees everything,' runs one. As if to remind us, designer Radu Boruzescu's tall trees, planted on a stage of tiered rows akin to the hillside audience's, observe it all throughout.
The resilient forest of Colonus is a stark contrast to Gianni Carluccio's set design for Electra, the second tragedy in the season at Syracuse. Carluccio's stage is sloped rather than stepped; much of the drama plays out on a tilted floor that resembles a building's collapsed exterior. The fall of the house of Atreus.
The dust-covered piano and busted bedstead give a sense that Electra still resides in a world before the brutal replacement of Agamemnon with Aegisthus at Clytemnestra's side. The windows, at this angle, become open graves; a plaintive string composition reverberates from within alongside the looped sound of broken glass. The scorched slabs at the back of the set begin to resemble fragments, too, of papyri.
Under Roberto Andò's direction, this piercing new translation by Giorgio Ieranò sharpens Electra's affinity with the natural world. Her opening speech ('O pure sunlight') is given at the piano. In the title role, Sonia Bergamasco is as indelible as Sartori's Oedipus – her pain similarly twisting through her gestures (one knee is bandaged and she moves like a wounded animal) while her mind logically processes her father's actions. Dressed in ragged grey, she seems to merge with the floor when she lies still but is otherwise a frenzy of rebellion. A similar heat rises from a hair-flicking, often hissing female chorus in shift dresses. The sight of the urn supposedly containing Orestes' ashes is felt in the gut: she crumples from within, tenderly caressing the object as if it was his body.
It's frequently asked why Orestes extends Electra's pain, fussily stage-managing his return, but Roberto Latini gives us a brother who after coolly planning the events is stunned by their reunion, almost unable to fathom it himself, fearful of her reaction. The moment is richly complex. Unlike Brie Larson in the recent London production, Bergamasco succeeds throughout in entwining the anger with grief. She is a sardonic match, too, for Clytemnestra (Anna Bonaiuto) who detonates the lines: 'Being a mother is a frightful thing. For as much as they hate you, there is no way to hate your own children.' This Electra is as physically disgusted as Hamlet is by the mother's 'enseamèd bed'.
A sense of contest is inseparable from Sophocles' work, which was regularly entered in Athenian competitions, and one of the play's toughest scenes to conquer is Paedagogus's action-packed fabrication detailing Orestes's death in a chariot race. Danilo Nigrelli steers the speech superbly, only the wind to be heard during each pause, its transfixing effect heightened by a chorus who inch closer towards the teller. You almost believe the lie yourself and reach the edge of your seat as Electra's stasis is succeeded by a swift and ruthless revenge.
The Greek theatre's summer programme runs until 6 July in Syracuse, Italy. Chris Wiegand's trip was provided by the National Institute of Ancient Drama.

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