By the late 1980s I had played a series of heroines at the RSC witty women on the brink of marriage, such as Portia, Beatrice and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. I associated acting with entertainment, with being able to turn a line on a sixpence and make people laugh. So when I was asked to do Electra I felt quite ambivalent. But I thought it would be a change. I'd just done Mary Stuart in Greenwich and had begun to see the power of tragedy.
Electra was very hard to rehearse. My brother had recently died in a car crash and this was the first production where I had experienced, to an extent, some of the high emotions described in the play. I felt more exposed than I had in comedy. If you're untrue in a Greek tragedy, it just doesn't deliver at all. You have to wait until it strikes a chord deep in the performers' hearts.
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