Electra’s father is murdered by her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, leaving Electra hysterical with grief – and with an obsessional desire for revenge, as she is made a prisoner in her mother’s house. Her only hope is that her exiled brother Orestes will return and make her dark fantasy of murdering her mother come true.

In Suzuki’s staging of the Greek myth, the characters’ interior world is deepened by setting the tragedy in a psychiatric hospital, one in which all of humanity is irredeemably trapped.

One of the most enduringly influential directors and theatre makers alive, Tadashi Suzuki is also renowned for his writings and the Suzuki Acting Method. Here he combines Euripides’s terrifying perception of human frailty with the operatic force of Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss’s librettist.