Overview
- Opening-night reviews published in the first days of September report that Benedict Andrews’s new Electra/Persona at the National Theatre pairs Sophocles’ Electra with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and has opened to mixed response.
- The production uses a live on-stage coin toss to decide nightly which lead plays which role, runs straight through at about two hours with no interval, and stages action on amphitheatre-style steps augmented by hand-held cameras for close-ups.
- Critics across outlets singled out Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss for powerful, magnetic performances that sustain much of the evening’s impact.
- Reviewers agreed the play’s Electra material lands more clearly, while the Persona section—set in a clinical recovery context and shown largely through intense close-ups—was widely judged slow, muddled, or emotionally distancing.
- The run continues at the National Theatre until 10 October, and early coverage suggests audiences and Andrews’s experiment-driven approach may need repeat viewings or edits to reconcile the two texts and lift the production’s second half.