For a second you think it could be Kathryn Hunter. Not even the washed-out poster images prepare you for the gaunt figure, seemingly several inches shorter than you expect, that emerges through the Mycenaean palace doors onstage amid the audience. (The Old Vic’s reconfigured in-the-round space is the way to see Greek drama.) But it is Kristin Scott Thomas, who as the protagonist of Sophocles’ play has made herself the living embodiment of Frank McGuinness’s 1997 translation.
    
McGuinness is the greatest contemporary English-language translator of Greek drama. His versions are monumental: they rear up like shards of stone, or of bone, from the parched red soil of the plain of Argos. Any particle suggestive of tone, or mood, or register is rigorously pared away; there is nothing to suggest that either the play or the translation might be a product of any place or time. They are like War Horse puppets of plays: the bare structure seems to capture the rippling musculature of the beast without any need for flesh.
    
Sometimes lines jut out at odd angles: there can be moments of grim bathos, as when Scott Thomas’s Electra switches from an anguished ritual of mourning her murdered father Agamemnon to a so-English briskness when the three-woman Chorus enters. Such laughs amid the grief are unexpected, but are consistent with Scott Thomas’s previous work with director Ian Rickson in Pinter and Chekhov, and in keeping with an Electra who is not really in control, managing somehow to be utterly obsessed and semi-dissociated at the same time. She jigs from foot to foot in a dance of frustration or impatience for revenge, as if contact with the earth that also bore her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s killers, burned her bare feet.
    
Scott Thomas is more than old enough to be the mother of Jack Lowden, who plays Electra’s twin brother Orestes; indeed, whether through a slip of the tongue or an uncharacteristic twist of translation, on press night she greeted the returned Orestes as “my darling, darling son”. It doesn’t matter, nor (risky though this sounds) does the awkward racist possibility raised by the casting of Tyrone Huggins as Aegisthus. This is a play about the women: Electra’s conflicted sister Chrysothemis (Liz White), trying to find an accommodation for them both; Diana Quick as a Clytemnestra who is not quite unbending but whose compassion has terminally atrophied; and Electra herself, who may have given her name to the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex but is here concerned not with her father’s living memory but with just retribution for his end.
     
Written for the Financial Times.