Eye For an Eye

Tadashi Suzuki is no stranger in Moscow. The acclaimed Japanese director has been bringing distinctive productions of drama and opera to Russia on tour for well over a decade. In 2004, he staged a searing version of "King Lear" at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. Now, at the Taganka Theater, he has created a Russian version of "Electra."

This brief, intense piece draws on the texts of Sophocles and the Viennese librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, although any discussion of text or plot must be qualified immediately. Imagine a screw stripped of everything but its threads. Imagine a book stripped of all but its letters. This might give some idea of the degree to which Suzuki hacked back to a nub the tree of this myth about a young woman seeking revenge on her mother for the murder of her father.

Suzuki's brand of theater in many ways exists to find new manners of communication. For this director and educator, who has taught acting technique all over the world, words are of secondary importance. As Suzuki told The New York Times in 2001, "One way of communicating is talk. But sometimes we must communicate without words and do it with energy."

Appropriately, "Electra" is a 60-minute blast of energy expended in a myriad of ways -- musically, rhythmically, physically and, yes, through speech. Actors are often static, their speech a monotonous, controlled shout. The nuances emerge in aspects of performance that might normally be considered minor. Through abrupt, synchronistic movements the five members of the chorus riding in formation about the stage in wheelchairs establish a sensation of massive force. No less important are those moments when the choreography breaks down -- an actor flies out of formation or turns the opposite way from the rest. Facial expressions -- a cocked eyebrow or a smile slowly transforming into a grimace -- become major statements. A foot deliberately turned to one side, a leg lifted, a torso twisted -- all of these gestures, too, are worked out and performed with such care that they grow into a physical language unto themselves. With remarkable clarity they express moods associated with anger, impatience, stealth and alarm.

The droning speech patterns have a dual effect. On one hand, they deflect attention from the dialogue to the movements of the actors in space. On another level, they concentrate attention on the actors' intonation and breathing. There is something primal in the sounds of this and every other Suzuki production -- his actors often sound like wolves howling, eagles screeching, lions roaring.

This production of "Electra" has been honed down to the bare statement of a problem. Electra (Nana Tatishvili) is infuriated because her mother, Clytemnestra (Lyubov Selyutina), murdered her father, Agamemnon. Against the counsel of her sister, Chrysothemis (Alexandra Basova), and to the horror of the chorus looking on, she encourages her brother, Orestes (Igor Mirkurbanov), to avenge murder with murder. Suzuki offers us access only to the key scenes in the playing out of this myth of a woman seeking justice by way of perpetuating crime.

Suzuki has long interpreted the works he stages as tales unfolding in hospitals or asylums and "Electra" is no different. His heroes and heroines are the sickest of the sick -- the ones ready, willing and able to provoke mayhem. Usually confined to wheelchairs, they are accompanied by silent doctors and nurses who stand by and wheel them about when necessary. Always present are the other inmates, those, perhaps, who are not quite as sick, not quite as capable of assassination. These are the members of the chorus, the representatives of the madding crowd who comment on and bear witness to the actions of the central figures.

In "Electra," Suzuki actually hands large amounts of Electra's text over to the chorus. It is still another sign of his belief that words say less than the expressions and gestures of the person who pronounces them. Usually standing rigidly at center-stage, Tatishvili has the extraordinarily difficult task of giving physical expression to her thoughts and emotions as they are spoken by others. Occasionally she allows herself a few grunts, giggles and guttural rattles, but the portrait she paints of her heroine is achieved primarily through body language. Tatishvili is like a wound-up spring throughout the hour's performance. Hanging on the edge of explosion, she represents disaster waiting to happen.

Following the scene in which it is reported that Orestes has murdered Clytemnestra, Electra goes into agonizing seizures which may create the image either of a person killing or of a person being killed. The ambiguity is crucial. Suzuki clearly intends us to understand that murderers are indistinguishable from the murdered.

Selyutina's turn as Clytemnestra is white hot. She is regal, threatening and brusquely dismissive of anything that goes against her wishes. "I don't want to hear what is truth and what is lie," she hisses. "Nobody knows. I want to hear what is pleasing!" Displaying the same kind of imperiousness that characterizes her brilliant performance of the title role in Yury Lyubimov's production of "Medea," Selyutina transforms Clytemnestra into a living and breathing concept -- the figure of power who acknowledges no restrictions on her whims and desires. What she cannot ignore, however, are her own dreams, which, as she says, are the bearers of evil.

Evil -- or, at least, the anticipation of it -- runs amok in the territory of Suzuki's production, and the most sensitive response to it comes from the chorus. Unlike the other characters, this quintet of wheelchair-bound bystanders is infected with a modicum of conscience and historical perspective. These unnamed, nearly faceless figures have seen the consequences of vengeful deeds before and it evokes in them horror and fear. Through them we recognize the madness of Electra and Clytemnestra, as well as the equally dangerous vacuity of Orestes. It is another thing altogether that they are powerless to influence the course of events.

The inevitability of this tale's outcome, that moment which the chorus counters so fervently but pointlessly, is echoed from the outset in the music composed and performed onstage by Midori Takada. Standing amid a rack of percussive instruments, Takada adds a dispassionate perspective to the goings-on. Her cymbal crashes signifying thunder and her staccato drum beats suggesting the throbbing conscience of a fevered mind all add up to a promise of disaster. They confirm what everyone knows is true: more blood will be shed. And after drumming and crashing her way through an extended and dazzling solo in the finale, Takada seems to implicate the audience as an accomplice to murder. With an abrupt flourish, she suddenly freezes while pointing her drum stick in the direction of the spectators.

For anyone who knows Suzuki's work, "Electra" offers little that is new. It essentially is the same production which the director mounted with his Shizuoka Performing Arts Center and which he brought to the International Theater Olympics in Moscow in 2001. But this incarnation of the show at the Taganka is done extremely well and is more than capable of standing on its own. In any case, its cautionary tale about the futility of answering murder with murder seems as timely as it ever has been.

"Electra" plays Sun. at 7 p.m. at the Taganka Theater, located at 76 Zemlyanoi Val. Metro Taganskaya. Tel. 915-1217, 915-1015. www.taganka.theatre.ru. Running time: 1 hour.