In PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) , an actress has a nervous breakdown while performing ELECTRA and stops speaking. The basic conceit in Benedict Andrews’ play is to combine the two; the first part starts off as a performance of Electra where each night Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss toss a coin in front of the audience as to who performs Electra and who Clytemnestra. The choice made, they take a moment to put on some make-up, step into the role, and onto the stage where the performance starts. A tour de force, played out on a simple set that looks like the steps to a temple, and in which aspects of the tragedy play out.

Cameras come out on in the second half, first pointed at the audience, then mainly in Elizabeth Vollander’s hands until her madness transfers onto Alma the nurse. We get more than a few winks to Bergman in this scenes, live-filmed onstage, in black and white, and where at one moment Hoss and Blanchett recreate the famous profile shot. Actors, acting, performance, mothering, mother-daughters, are all part of the material that the play is working through, and I found it a thrill.

I’m ambivalent about Blanchett recognising her as a great actress but to me on film only truly effective when she plays outsize characters: queens, stars, fairies. Onstage it’s different because somehow the theatricality charges the air around her. Onstage, she ‘displaces air’ as someone said of Cagney, so that the theatricality itself becomes a conduit to the recognisable and human. That nervous, energy, that electricity generated, is something I associate with the greatest film actors (Cagney, Davis, Garland, later Fonda and Jack Nicholson have that quality). Blanchett has it onstage. Nina Hoss was also wonderful (first as Electra, then as the catatonic actress, Elizabeth Vollander), without being quite so commanding, except in the filmed parts, where she was masterful with minimalist expression, making full use of those close-ups. I found their performance a tour de force and a thrill to witness. There are two other actors but they appear briefly.

The play itself I’m unsure of, and I’m not a fan of the live filming, though it worked better here than in many other instances I’ve seen. Our waiter at the BFI restaurant was chatting to us before the show and told us the whole technical thing had been a disaster earlier but was now under control, and indeed it was. They also eliminated the intermission so it’s two hours straight through, which I think definitely concentrated its power. I enjoyed it very much and it felt a privilege to see those two great actresses working together on such challenging material so close-up (we could see the streaks of powder on Blanchett’s face).

José Arroyo