Elektra

Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is completely absorbed by the desire to avenge the death of her father, murdered by her mother with the complicity of her lover, Aegisthus.

Chased out of the palace by Clytemnestra, in the grip of terrible premonitory nightmares, the intransigent Electra tries in vain to obtain the support of her sister Chrysothemis. Only the unhoped-for return of her brother Orestes could bring retribution for the murder of the valiant Agamemnon. A mysterious stranger arrives to announce Orestes' death, but he is none other than Orestes himself, returned in disguise to indulge his sister in her relentless hunger for revenge.

Hofmannsthal's text, written in 1903, is influenced by his time and the cultural context surrounding the poet: Vienna, at the time Europe's third largest capital city after London and Paris, where among other things Freud had just coined a new term and initiated a new practice: psychoanalysis.

Novicov's adaptation re-actualises the myth, placing the characters in a contemporary context.

"In an era in which we are accelerating relentlessly, in which we delegate to hard disks the function of storing existence, in which we forget as quickly as possible in order to make room for new information to be forgotten immediately afterwards, who is right? Is Chrysothemis right in wanting to get married, have children, perpetuate life, move on, or is Electra right in stubbornly fighting against forgetting? There is something heroic in Electra's stubbornness in not forgetting, and this courage - which may have had its day - reappears in all its relevance in the face of the planned oblivion of the times we are given to live in. Electra has established herself in front of the palace and, by her presence, wants to fight so that the responsibilities of her mother - but we could say of fathers in general - are not forgotten. Is this not the same obstinacy that we find in the generation of young people who camp out in the squares, from Madrid to New York, from Cairo to Paris?" (From the director's notes by Andrea Novicov)