There is a charitable, not to say timid, attitude in both politics and the arts along the lines of “Like Such-and-Such or loathe him/her/it, you have to admire the commitment.” But why? What is creditable about even consummate discipline if it is in the service of dreary monotony? Why should we bestow kudos for the intense training the Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki gives his actors, instilling in them a precision beyond even most of the drill squads in the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, if all that he and they do with it is skoosh around on wheelchairs obsessively hammering the single point that the whole world is a hospital from which we never emerge healthy?

All the principal characters here appear in wheelchairs (although Electra herself moves clear of hers early on). This includes the chorus, who spend the first 15 minutes of this 70-minute piece (based on Euripides’ version of the ancient Greek story, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1903 play and 1909 libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera) scuttling around in unison, foot-propelled (which makes a nonsense of the whole business anyway) like a kind of Shogunate of Silly Walks, er, Trundles. The chorus also deliver most of Electra’s lines; only on a couple of occasions does Yoo-Jeong Byun, crouched and glaring intensely, voice herself the character’s obsessive desire for her brother Orestes to return and take revenge upon their murderous mother Clytemnestra. In the latter role, Chieko Naito first enters standing in her wheelchair like a charioteer. Electra’s predominant muteness turns this into Clytemnestra’s drama, in the lengthiest section in which she speaks of her disturbing dreams and her hunger to be rid of them; it is the chorus who speak for Electra to tell Clytemnestra that the only sacrifice that will end her dreams is that of her own life.

The hospital motif has been a keynote of Suzuki’s work on a number of occasions. However, rather than articulating a Beckettian existential despair, I am afraid that this particular showing does little more than suggest that the director is as obsessive-neurotic as his protagonist. The most dynamic, and arguably the most eloquent, presence onstage is percussionist Midori Takada, whose drumming comes to seem not simply an accompaniment to the actors but the pulse that drives them.
     
Written for the Financial Times.