“Elektra/Persona,” the U.K. National Theatre production fusing Sophocles’ “Elektra” with Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” grew out of friendship rather than a directorial concept imposed after casting, according to director Benedict Andrews.
Andrews, Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss spoke at a BFI Southbank conversation held ahead of the play’s run, moderated by “The Guardian” chief film critic Peter Bradshaw following a screening of a restored 35mm print of Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece.
“Elektra/Persona” runs at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre from Aug. 19 to Oct. 10. In Sophocles’ “Elektra,” the title character mourns her father’s murder and waits for her brother, Orestes, to return and help her avenge it at the hands of their mother, Clytemnestra. In Bergman’s “Persona,” an actress, Elisabet, falls silent mid-performance and is sent to recuperate on a remote island, where a nurse, Alma, is assigned to care for her and the two women’s identities begin to blur. Andrews’ production stages “Elektra” in its first half and “Persona” in its second, with Blanchett and Hoss alternating between Elektra and Clytemnestra, and between Alma and Elisabet. The cast also includes Ella Lily Hyland. The production is staged by arrangement with Music Theatre International on behalf of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.
Andrews described the production’s structure, with Blanchett and Hoss playing all four roles across the evening and swapping nightly.
“It wasn’t an idea of like, either Cate or Nina should be Elektra or Elisabet,” Andrews said. “You would cast it very differently; you’d cast an older Clytemnestra, arguably you’d cast a younger Alma. The idea that in this piece about doubling and mirroring, the idea that they should become each other, and literally that that idea is embedded into our production with them playing both the roles and swapping the roles nightly, that’s built into the muscles and the fabric of the production.”
Andrews said the collision of the two source works was only part of what drove the project.
“And so, I think the idea was then for us, beyond my fascination with the collision of these two pieces, the idea was born out of friendship, and the idea was born out of our delights in being in rehearsal rooms together, the things we bring out from each other in rehearsal rooms, the way that we all push each other and the text in rehearsal rooms, and the way that we share the idea of a rehearsal room being a search and an experiment,” Andrews said.
Andrews also noted the extent of his history with his two leads. “Cate and I, I think this is our fourth time working together,” Andrews said. The pair’s previous collaborations include “The War of the Roses” (2009), “Big and Small” (2011-12) and “The Maids” (2013-14), staged with the Sydney Theatre Company. Andrews directed Hoss in “The Cherry Orchard” at the Donmar Warehouse in 2024.
Andrews said his fascination with the pairing stemmed from Bergman’s own position at what he called the “hinge or intersection of theater and cinema” – the director ran Stockholm’s Dramaten theater while making “Persona,” stepping down the same year the film was released.
“I felt you can’t – it’s difficult to stage ‘Persona’ in a way on its own, because it’s so singular, and in such a strange atmosphere,” Andrews said. “It’s like another planet, like a kind of vacuum. And the idea that it would have this counter-energy, this feral, muscular violence of the Greek drama format.”
Bradshaw asked how the pair protected their mental health while juggling both plays and swapping parts nightly. “I had a breakdown today!” Blanchett said, drawing laughter from the audience. Both actors insisted they were fine, though Hoss said the two had turned to each other that afternoon and agreed neither could imagine doing the production with anyone else. Blanchett cut in that the sentiment applied “every afternoon,” to more laughter.
Hoss said she does not approach the four roles as conventional characters, but as facets of “the same spirit,” with each actor’s choices reshaping what the other can do in turn.
“There’s a lot of masking and unmasking,” Blanchett said. “We were talking today, too, about persona being a mask. The word persona. But that also, the ancient Greek word for actor comes from hypocrite: to reveal or to examine under a mask some form of truth, that’s often an uncomfortable truth. And of course, didn’t have any pejorative meaning at all then. But Clytemnestra wears as many masks as other people do. Even Elektra does, she wears the mask of grief, and who is she without that mask of grief? And Clytemnestra’s got her own grief, so there’s a bit of a ‘grief-off’ between the two women!”
Bradshaw raised the ambiguity of the film’s central letter, in which Elisabet leaves an envelope open for Alma to read, and asked whether Bergman was showing a darker, more sadistic side of his heroine.
“I think we are constantly in a state of knowing and not knowing simultaneously, wanting to hide and wanting to be revealed simultaneously,” Blanchett said. “I think that’s part of being alive.”
Hoss offered a different account of the letter scene, characterizing it less as calculated cruelty than as an act of curiosity that shifts the power balance between the two women once Alma reads it.
Andrews said the piece’s swapped-role structure demands generosity from both actors, requiring each to relinquish the instinct to defend her own character’s position within the mother-daughter conflict at the center of “Elektra.”
BFI Fellow Blanchett was credited by Bradshaw with helping secure the 35mm print for two screenings that evening.
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