Electra Themes, Culture and Conventions

What social, cultural and political themes were contained in the play Electra?


We are exposed to few political themes within Electra, the first one we are exposed to is how women were not as powerful as men. There were certain traditions like how women couldn't seek the revenge if someone was murdered in their family it was down to the man. Also as it was set in a time were equality was not as popular as it is now so the equality between men and women was none existence. The culture and social themes I have explained in other posts.


Are they meaningful for both the original audiences and current theatre goers?


Yes as the audience can relate to the period Electra was set in. So even if they don't have a first hand source of the themes they can imagine and it can still be meaningful. Everything is meaningful if you put meaning to it so if the actors portrayed what they were suppose to and they put in meaning and emotion then the audience can also capture that.


What did you do to ensure you were fully appreciating the context of the plays?


I did a lot of research about Electra which gave me a closer insight which allowed me to fully appreciate the context of the play. This allowed me to explore many ways on how to conduct my performance trialling out different ways so I could chose which way would expose the best out of my character.



I will briefly be noting some key differences from modern day time and the ancient Greek times and how these would affect the performance of Electra. One of the main differences were actually the audience as they would have been in an amphitheater. This meant that audience members could be quite far away from the actors. This was very different with our performance of Electra as we had the audience on 3 sides so they had a more intimate experience with our production.


If actors didn't perform well in the ancient greek times the audience as an insult would throw food at them, fortunately that's a tradition which has faded out so this didn't happen in our performance.