Character Study - Electra

Name: Electra

Age: 18

Family Life 

Electra was sent off to marry a man of a lower status by her mother to allow her mother and her mothers lover to take over Argos, her father has been lost at sea coming back from war so her mother went of with Aegithos. She hasn’t seen her brother since she was younger as her mother sent him away so that she could rule with Aegithos.

Personality

Electra is a woman who is strong and confident, she was born in the wrong century, women in her time were expected to just be seen and not heard and she wants to be heard as she knows her mind, she cares deeply about her family and becomes very attached to her brother.

Context

Before the play Electra has had life fairly badly and this is part of the reason why she's so defensive and more forthright as she is. During the play Electra discovers herself and the power she has over her life and her voice. She also finds a way of manipulating people and getting things out of them she also by doing this creates her own demise. After the play, I'm not quite so sure about what happens to her after all this but from how I know the character she will have let her tongue get her killed.

Relationships

Mother: She kills her mother for killing her father, so you could say it's not a brilliant relationship, her mother also sent her beloved brother away, and her away to “ a shameful degrading marriage”

Father: She never totally knew her father as he went away to war when she was young. She obviously held great affection towards her father because she killed her own mother for killing him.

Orestes: Her relationship with him is slightly complicated, he is her brother, even though she hasn't seen him since she was a child, she is now reunited with him and finds herself strangely attracted to him, this is due to the fact that they are close and are known to each other but in this case she is attracted to him as more than just her brother, and he feels quite similarly this creates the close yet complicated relationship between them.

Tyndareos: She has a very volatile relationship with Tyndareos because she always looked up to him as a great man and when she needed him most he let her down. She now has a much more skeptical view of him as a result they both hate each other. She does confront him in the play and he does see a form of where he went wrong but not much of a way.

Menalaos: Electra and menalaos have a good relationship, they have never wronged each other and he is willing to help her as he sees why she killed her mother to avenge his brother. He also keeps and eye on her and guides her in any way he can.

Helen: Electra very much dislikes Helen, Helen treats her life a bug on a windscreen and thinks she can't do anything or think for herself and Electra can in fact she sees a lot more than Helen thinks she does, Electra just keeps quiet about it. Electra also finds Helen to be lacking somewhat in the quality of personality.

Style

I found becoming Electra and being her in a production that uses both Greek influences in a contemporary play to be quite interesting, easy and difficult all at the same time this was because I felt I still needed to keep the older elements of Electra when bringing her into a contemporary production. She still needed to be somewhat stuck in the old ways such as being quiet and standing back as a woman as she would be expected to be but also to have that new age flair. Lucky for me the old Electra had already begun to explore herself and ideals, standing up to the men in her family and also getting her brother to aid her in the killing of her mother, she in some way learns how to manipulate the men in her life to help her in her endeavours. This mad it a lot easier to try and add the contemporary tones to her character. To aid me in developing Electra in a Contemporary style setting I did research into what life would have been like for Electra in the time of the original text and I found that her life would have been very shadowed and she wouldn't have seen much of the world, she would have been expected to stay at home and do almost nothing. I used internet research to gain a good perspective on what her life would have been like compared to modern times. For the Greek Chorus I didn't use too much research into actual Greek Chorus instead I looked at musicals and their Choruses because they flow and tell the story too only in song and I saw them as a variation especially with the chorus dancing and tableaux's I saw a real similarity and connection, I used this as inspiration.

Characterisation

I saw her posture as good with a slight slouch to show she was well brought up but at the same time I wanted that bit of rebellion to be surrounding her. She has a clear concise voice to match her background she may have airs about her that say otherwise but I wanted her well spoken voice to be a definitive part of her. For her emotions I found this more difficult because I wanted her to be closed off and numb to everything because of what has happened to her. I remedied this by using small hand movements a lot to show what she was feeling such as a clenched fist at her side, I wanted it to be subtle yet powerful at the same time.

Greek Blog 5 (25th - 29th)

This week started with us looking at the first act and working on how we were going to complete it. Firstly we worked through the first act straight and looked at what needed working on and what had yet to still be done. We looked at the scene where Abbi is playing electra with the chorus we worked on our parts as the chorus and how we wanted our separate minions of Tyndareos to be seen, not all the characters of the chorus could be the same so we spent quite a lot of time working on how we were going to have them come out and across. In movement we worked on a scene where as the chorus and newspaper reporters we were using newspapers in the movements in the chorus pieces, we worked as a group to show the words that Abbi was saying and how we as a chorus would react to such words and created a scene in which we were all over the place but at the same time were the interested and nosey journalists that were willing to do anything to get information to relay to the papers. In Voice we worked on sounds and how they come out and sound and to make them much clearer, this comes in with the Greek theatre because of what and how the text is set out and works it's a lot like shakespeare in a way with the difficulty of the language.

On wednesday we worked on the same areas again in more detail taking on what we had already done on the monday and adding what we had come up with over the other day. In the afternoon we looked at another section of the chorus, this part we divided up so that everyone was in groups of twos and were each given a section of the chunk of text to work on, for this part we were all lined up in chairs and used our own ideas in the pairs to enact what our lines were, this idea also came from our previous devised piece which was used in one of the performances. this proved quite the challenge and the group dynamics didn't go well here as there were lots of arguments and people were blaming others for not doing work when they were struggling, this showed that the group was not communicating with each other as they needed to be. This was causing great tension in the whole class and meant that we didn't get much work done in the time we had and that we could have certainly done a lot more in the time than what we managed.

On thursday we mostly looked at the bath scene and worked on how we would stage this as it's quite tricky, using a moving bath that when you try to get in or lean against moves and disturbs the scene and set. Through this I found that the group got quite restless and concentration went down quite a lot, meaning that work wasn't being done as efficiently as it could have been, granted it was the last day of our week and we were tired and looking forward to the weekend we should have still been able to concentrate and work as this is what we will be doing if we choose to pursue this as a career. This was further proved when we revisited the chairs chorus scene at the end of the day and the entire group dynamic was helter skelter, there were people taking control without allowing anyone any ideas this is not a good this because not only does it in still in peoples minds that one person is superior in a group where we are all equals but also that no ideas are being heard when they could make the piece an entire success.