Theatre review: Electra/Persona

The latest production to employ the staging conceit of the lead actors alternating roles is Benedict Andrews' Electra Forward Slash Persona, a show that already has a pretty high concept as its starting point: Andrews' play is a mashup of Sophocles' Electra with Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, about the relationship between an actress who's suddenly turned mute and the nurse assigned to look after her. So the play opens with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss asking an audience member in the front row to toss a coin (or in tonight's case, fling it to the ground in a wild panic.) Given the winner gets to choose which part she wants to play this would be a very easy way to rig the system and have the actors pre-agree who was going to do what*, but regardless of how much it's actually down to chance, tonight saw Blanchett opt to play Clytemnestra in the Greek Tragedy half of the evening.Clytemnestra is the queen who murdered her husband as soon as he returned from his ten-year war in Troy, so…