Author Description

As a dramatist, Tom McGrath's great strength is to pare things down to the fewest possible words, the sparsest settings, only the most elemental action. His extraordinary stroke with Electra is to seize on the brevities of Greek tragedy and whittle them down even further. The result: a lethal little piece, bristling with menacing meanings and consequences, representing a total minefield. We watch in horror as the characters blunder through it. His Electra is self-righteously correct, mad and disastrous. His Orestes, rather than god-enlightened, is a hesitant teenager blinded by a vision of new beginnings. All the characters have a dubious mixture of self-deluding, self-interested and high-minded motives. All are fatally credulous, believing messengers and messages even less reliably credentialed than CNN, Fox or the BBC. This piece zings with more compressed meaning than many ten times its length. It resonates powerfully for all of us watching similar stories unfolding in the Middle East, Congo, Rwanda, the USA and Northern Ireland. - Bob Tait, theatre reviewer and literary critic.