Incest, revenge and dark magic in the Odeon’s new production of Electra and Orestes
LONDON, ENGLAND
THE STORY of Electra and Orestes is hardly one that needs embellishment to keep its audience awake through its five acts. A stomach-churning tale of revenge and honour, greed and vice and love in all its twisted forms, following the rise and fall of Orestes and his sister Electra as they plot to take the throne and avenge their father Agammemnon, Sophocles’ classic play makes even the raunchiest of our plays look tame by comparison. Indeed, classical scholars frequently complain that our modern stage tends towards censorship in its stagings of Electra and Orestes.
Aristochanus Marlowe’s adaptation of Electra and Orestes, then, should please those that criticize the bawdlerization of this play’s modern productions, with its unflinching approach to this bloody tale of revenge. In this adaptation, Electra and Orestes’ closeness to each other takes on a sinister turn, the incestuous undertones of the original text amplified in an impassioned monologue delivered by Orestes to his sister as they plot their revenge. Michael Blishwick’s Orestes is fierce and pathetic by turns as he wrestles with self-doubt and unsurety under the looming shadow of the throne; and the vile crime they are about to commit. But it is Camille Plautin who is the star of this show, in a memorable performance as Electra - strong-willed and proud yet frail, consumed by this need for revenge borne of what is later revealed to be an unhealthy bond to her father she persists in clinging to.
It is after Electra inveigles Orestes into pledging himself to revenge their father by any means, however, that we truly reach the heart of Marlowe’s adaptation. Fearing that they may be found out and executed, Electra makes Orestes promise that he will agree to do anything to keep himself alive. Once he has sworn this, in blood and with an Unbreakable Vow, Electra tells him that he must kill her and make a horcrux in which he may place half his soul. Orestes is naturally horrified and refuses. Ms Plautin’s Electra is at her very best here, raving and weeping, threatening and mocking, savage and tender, calling his love for her false until Orestes yields unwillingly. Maria Vyayetskaya is truly magnificent as Clytemenestra as she attempts to reason with her son, half-mad with grief and guilt and still covered in his sister’s blood. Nothing will stop Orestes however, and by the end of the play the stage is slick with blood and a body count that rivals that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Critics will decry Marlowe’s decision to include a portrayal of the creation of a horcrux on stage for all the bad memories it will undoubtedly awake in the audience. There are some who might even go so far as to claim that it may give people ‘ideas’. The actual process barring Electra’s murder, however, is not shown directly on stage, but is hinted at indirectly through an intricately performed light and shadow play. Mr Marlowe himself believes that it is necessary for the public to face their fears and misgivings about horcruxes and other dark magic. As he puts it, it is in the dark that dark magic truly festers and not under the bright lights of the theatre stage.
There are those who may also lament the glamour that this particular adaptation of Electra and Orestes brings to the matter of revenge and revenge killings. Certainly neither Electra nor Orestes are punished or even chastened for their single-minded pursuit of this morally reprehensible goal. They have missed the point of this play. The answer lies in the odd glance, in cracked voices and in the harsh bright lights and the stark white sets, reminiscent of the wards at St Mungo’s, that Mr Marlowe has chosen for this production. The play meticulously picks at the inconsistencies and the emptiness of the tragic lives of these two siblings; venomous tentacula that grow sickly as the bright lights strip away the pretenses and the masks, leaving empty eyes and profound despair behind in a harsh and unforgiving landscape that mirrors the hollow emptiness of Electra and Orestes’ souls. Mr Marlowe gets to the heart of the tragedy of Electra and Orestes in this adaptation, looking beyond its bloody ending to pick apart their fractured souls. The Odeon’s latest offering truly does show us that dark souls fester in the dark and not in the harsh light of the stage.
Electra and Orestes is running at the Odeon theatre until February 8th.
He’s your reflection - if you were better looking. Bright hope filled eyes, untainted despite his painful past, and a winner’s smile. Your twin brother. The better twin.
Even his lips are better than yours, soft and sweet as they slide against your own. You wish that he wanted this as horribly as you do. You can wait, though.
People will say that they’re all about respecting sa survivors until it comes to victims of incest. Will expand later.
Overall I’ve found that people, most likely subconsciously, don’t think that incest can be traumatic. When I told my therapist that I was sexually abused she was so supportive. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. That what happened doesn’t define me. That I can always tell her about this stuff without fear of judgment or rejection. That whatever happened, my trauma is valid. Then I told her that it was from someone in my family, and her tone switched immediately. All of a sudden it couldn’t have actually been that bad. What I was describing most be an overexaggeration. “It’s normal for families to show their love in different ways,” she said. “There most have been a miscommunication.” She didn’t listen to me anymore. I told her the worst of what happened in graphic detail, but none of that mattered. We were related. There’s no way that actually happened. And this is far from an isolated incident. I got blocked by one of my favorite cosplayers, one that was vocal about protecting minors and respecting triggers, for saying that incest survivors getting triggered by the twins, even if they are supposed to be satire or an act, is s valid reason to not watch ohshc. Both online and irl, people who vocally opposed to joking about sexual abuse would make incest jokes and even joke about my experiences explicitly. There’s a widespread belief in our society that incest is funny or not a real issue. And most activists not only refuse to acknowledge that this is an issue, but get upset when you try to educate them on it. This belief keeps getting spread, and it actively keeps us from being believed, from getting treatment, from getting justice. This belief keeps us silent and lets our abusers go free.
If you aren’t an incest survivor you are legally obligated to reblog this
@dyke-uncle this is an excellent addition thank you
Especially if your sibling was/is close in age during it all
People will try and tell you “oh yknow all kids play doctor! you’re taking it too seriously, you’re overreacting”
It’s already hard enough to talk about and then you’re constantly met with people trying to coerce you into a narrative that makes them more comfortable at your expense
Bad. Things. Happen.
People close to you, related to you by blood or law or close long term bond, can hurt you. It’s a horrifying reality to grapple with but downplaying what happened to us doesnt make that fact any easier for you to bear in the long run, and leads to our self harm and suicide.
[…] in Allison’s widely acclaimed novel [Bastard Out of Carolina], Bone appears to be alone with her fantasies, alone in her struggles, her shame, her self-doubt, her rage, her solitary pleasures and pain. Significantly, Bone’s little sister Reese does not appear in the novel as Allison once saw her in “Private Rituals” [the short story that heavily influenced the later novel]. “Private Rituals” is a story in which Bone has a companion, a secret survivor who travels a path that takes a different form than the narrator’s, who nonetheless crosses or intersects with her in highly charged moments. In the novel Bone’s sister Reese’s presence is spare, because she is presented as if she had been spared. Bone has little affinity with her. Reese is the one who “gets away,” while Bone becomes the singular target of her step-father, Daddy Glen’s, raging jealousies and insecurities. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison does include a scene in which Bone becomes aware that Reese also masturbates, but she knows little or nothing else of her sister’s private rituals, and the readers must come to the conclusion that Reese has been exempted from the agonizingly pleasurable sexual fantasies that Bone engages in. The novel also shows us little concerning how Bone puts these fantasies into practice.
Such is not the story of “Private Rituals.” Collected in the anthology High Risk, surrounded by other writers whose sexual fantasies challenge normative inscriptions of sexuality, Allison’s narrative “I,” who will later become Bone, not only fantasies about the fire in the haystack, fetishizes the belts that Daddy Glen uses to whip her, and masturbates to the re-membering of the beatings, as she does in the novel. She also acts out her masochistic pleasures in much more graphic detail than in the novel. The games she had dreamed about for so long become her own private reality, her way of bearing the secret of being “different”: she uses scraps of worn belts and her mother’s clotheslines to tie herself down to the bed; she finds a link of broken chain, cleans and polishes it and locks it around her hips, pushing the links inside her; she wears layers of thick cotton panties and sleeps with her arms spread-eagled so that she wouldn’t sin – but it was “a joke on Jesus” as well as herself that she began to have orgasms in that position; she uses screwdrivers, hairbrush handles, rocks, letter openers, and pine cones to replace the test tubes she first discovered in her chemistry set and manipulated into dildos. And, in “Private Rituals,” Allison’s “I” has sex with her beloved Uncle Earle, who gives her dollar bills to let him rub up against her backside. She enjoys it so much that she begins to initiate the sex, until Earle gets frightened and withdraws from his niece’s precocious voluptuousness.
Allison chose not to risk these details in her novel, knowing that a wider audience might read it and aware that few people outside s/m subcultures can tolerate or fathom these differences from sexual “norms.” The story also tells us much about what can be said and done within a community of similarly-minded writers, compared to the constraints of the novel as a singular form.
Allison’s nascent Bone is already beyond the kind of intervention some readers might desire for her. Furthermore, she has, in her own ways, solved the problem of the horror of her daily existence by construction these fantasies. These private rituals are not “evidence” of an irremediably wounded child. On the contrary, they are her remedy and they exist for her as luxuriously pleasurable. What haunts her in these moments are her feelings of guilt and shame. Not so much because she is doing something that she knows to be somehow “different” but mainly because she feels so alone in this difference. her shame is not caused by the memory of the acts she endured without her consent; rather, it is produced by her isolation. It is the loneliness that makes her pain endure. She thus is incredibly relieved when she makes the simple recognition that her little sister masturbates as well.
Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism by Lynda Hart (1998, Columbia University Press)
it’s literally impossible to have a normal discussion about media consumption on this website because every time you say ‘this website moralizes media consumption to a bizarre degree and treats what shows people watch like the be all end all of activism’ then people who think there’s nothing wrong with writing incest fanfiction start agreeing with you and every time you say ‘media consumption is not a morally neutral activity and fiction does impact reality, and there is certain media that you can’t ethically consume’ then people who call stephen universe ‘irredeemable media’ start agreeing with you
sorry for comment leaving but also imo also worth pointing out that “consumption” of media is not inherently ANYTHING, morally or value-wise, because consumption is not a single mode of engagement with a text. though of course this changes radically if you are saying “consumption” in the fandom-y sense (which I take this post to be doing, and in that case pretty firmly agree with the above statements in that context) then that’s a highly specific mode of readership compared to literally any other type of engagement.
like the goodness or badness of a work does not rub off on you by virtue of it being absorbed through your eyeballs, it’s very much a matter of what you bring to the table as an Active Participant and how you are choosing to interpret or understand or analyze its meaning as a text. there are absolutely terrible immoral things in this world that offer meaningful lessons by nature of their terribleness, and consuming these things is not itselfan unethical act (far from it), but the moral and intellectual value of that consumption is entirely dependent on your own engagement as a reader and the types of knowledge you’re seeking in those texts.
which is to say that studying old nazi propaganda is an incredibly effective tool for understanding history and combatting the resurgence of similar reactionary movements, although these pieces of propaganda can just as easily be used to further the very same reactionary movements—and it’s entirely dependent on people’s modes of engagement, because “consumption” is not a uniform or unilateral act. which is ALSO to say that reading and writing incest fanfiction as a hobby is not a particularly constructive or useful mode of engagement (and is in fact downright harmful and weird), so it’s absolutely accurate to delineate this specific phenomenon as bad (or “unethical”) consumption, lol.
The others are all incest and/or AU, but only one is explicit. Each fic has warnings and is under a cut. (Pairings include Fëanor/Míriel, Fëanor/Finwë, Caranthir/Celegorm with implied OT8.)
Don’t expect anything particularly well-written and don’t expect much Tolkien either.
I don’t think I’ll ever post these to AO3, since it’d be useless.
i have to wait until the 17th to get an ao3 invite but i really need to get this out so here goes nothing.
[set after the movie. i didn’t write enough about the background setting so i thought this would help?]
—————
Isabela doesn’t know how things escalated so quickly. Or maybe she does but her mind is just struggling to catch up with how she’s so impossibly close to Mirabel right now, much closer than they’ve ever been since the failed gift ceremony, that her brain just went oops! and deleted all the details that led up to this moment.
She thinks it’s stupid — the way her heart’s racing at even just the thought of cuddling when she had been quite literally on top of, below and inside Mirabel a couple of times already. It’s so stupid. It’s so incredibly stupid that she can’t even get herself to scoff.
Having the girl so close was doing many, many things to her. She couldn’t even think of being hot and bothered now. All of Isabela’s attention was directed at the beating of her heart — how it’s so loud she’s scared Mirabel might hear it, wake up and talk to her. Or ask her in that adorable sleepy drawl of hers, with those eyes that can’t see for shit without her glasses so she has to squint, “Isa? What’s wrong?” Isabela would have to kiss her then because it would be a crime not to, and kissing more often than not leads to grabby prodding hands and their clothes slipping off their shoulders.
Tomorrow was going to be a big day. Something about a wedding, the church needing some color and their Abuela needing Isabela’s flowers fresh and ready hours before the ceremony.
There was no way Mirabel could hear it but she made sure, anyway. Just in case. (Not really. Isabela just wanted to look at her little sister’s sleeping face.) Moving slightly to steal a glance at the smaller girl’s face, she prays to both heaven and hell that Mirabel’s deep in sleep.
And then she halted suddenly, as if she had seen something unknown fly by her and she needed to know what it was.
When did Mirabel become so beautiful?
Under the cloak of the night and within the safety of her magical room, Isabela didn’t need to be wary of anyone’s gaze and what they might think. So she takes her time getting a good long look at Mirabel’s pretty, unabashedly imperfect face.
Without the slightest hint of powder, without any furrowed brow caused by physical strain, and with only peace and comfort to adorn her face, Mirabel was beautiful. The people of the valley could praise Isabela’s beauty and talent for as long as their lives and tongues could let them but damn all their flowerbeds if they haven’t spared Mirabel the same treatment. Isabela’s fingers itched to caress each and every wrinkle — the ones Mirabel got through the years because she laughed freely when she did, because she smiled as often as her heart let her, because she loved and was not afraid to show it.
Isabela had to stop herself from reaching out when she noticed the slightest crease on Mirabel’s forehead. What could you be dreaming of? For a second she wished she could kiss away the bad dream and hug her tighter. Then maybe it’ll bring comfort to her dreams and ease that wrinkled space.
Maybe that’s possible but she’s not sure so she doesn’t.
Isabela stayed there unmoving, and yet, at the same time, speeding through hours, weeks and months into the future. She began to wonder, now with more optimism compared to the nights she spent wondering when her Tio Bruno’s prophecy will come true. If she had enough guts to say it directly, if she could say it without beating around the bush, or looking away, or brushing it off with the same haughtiness she exuded on a daily basis — she wondered if she could steal Mirabel away from their responsibilities as Madrigals for just a moment and not feel guilty about it. Maybe there was a life with Mirabel where she could freely call her sister mi vida, seizing what little freedom closed doors and hushed conversations could afford them. And Mirabel wouldn’t have an astounded look on her face because Isabela showing her affection isn’t strange, awkward and out of place anymore. Because by then, she would know that Isabela adores her the way Agustín and Félix adore their wives. Mirabel could look up at her and smile, cheeks dusted rose pink, and call her something cheesy like mi corazón.
The sheer thought, the mere suggestion excites and terrifies Isabela. She’s never done this before. She had Mariano but he didn’t make her feel like a happy fool. None of Mariano’s heartfelt serenatas could ever match the way Mirabel makes her feel; deeply, madly, truly in love.
Isabela stayed there, unmoving. Maybe she’ll stay like that and force herself to be satisfied with her love life’s status quo. Maybe she’ll never make a move, maybe she will. As her breathing fell into rhythm with Mirabel’s own, in the silence of the night, both of them vulnerable and at peace, Isabela decided she could give herself more time.
The next day, a cactus grew between Mirabel and some boy with hair growing past his nape and a pair of eyes stuck staring at Mirabel and the bouquet in her hands.
Isabela apologized gracefully, blaming the cactus’ growth on her unconscious response at something else entirely. Something that wasn’t Mirabel politely shoving the bouquet back into the bride’s hands and insisting she was too young to be catching a bouquet, Agustín having a whispering battle with Julieta; his wife telling him, “You said it yourself, Mirabel is still young. She won’t be getting married soon,” — something that wasn’t her newest fear barging in on her peace in the form of a boy who looks like he’s writing a love song in his head as he continued to stare at Mirabel.
