Zoe Wanamaker - British stage actor - Interview

Interview, April, 1999 by John Heilpern

Zoe Wanamaker gave the performance of her lifetime in the recent Broadway production of Electra. For the formidable British-raised actor, it was a long and arduous journey to this triumphant moment

JOHN HEILPERN: One of the most astonishing things about Electra is that it's actually on Broadway. I mean, here's a twenty-four-hundred-year-old tragedy about the wish to kill your mother, and it's in the company of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Beauty and the Beast, which are essentially cartoons. Why do you think Electra has proved such a success?

ZOE WANAMAKER: I think there is a niche for Beauty and the Beast, but there are also people who want to see good drama, who want to be moved by something.

JH: Have you read your reviews? They are, as you probably know, universal raves.

ZW: No. I stopped reading my reviews sometime in the '80s. I was in The Importance of Being Earnest, with Peter Hall directing, and after the first week I asked him if he would release me from my contract. It was a very English play, and it was the first time I felt I was too American and Jewish to play a role. And when we opened one reviewer said something like "Zoe Wanamaker is no more like an aristocrat than Eliza Doolittle was before she changed in Pygmalion." It crippled me for the rest of the run because I believed him. Some people can read their reviews and not worry about them. But I can't - I become too self-critical.

JH: David Hare has said, admiringly, that you have "the most extraordinary mixture of self-confidence and self-doubt." Ring a bell?

ZW: I think he's right. [laughs] I've acted in several of his plays, and i think he's wonderful because he makes me concentrate on things that are not about me: Why are we doing the play? What is the play about? Why did the writer write the play? What did the director want to say with the play? Those are my rules as an actor, to always ask those questions.

JH: So do you mind obliging us with the answers concerning Electra?

ZW: Paramount in this production, I think, are family and love. And what happens to children of war.

JH: The play is essentially about Electra's overriding desire to avenge the murder of her father [Agamemnon] by her mother [Clytemnestra]. And this, in a sense, has wrecked Electra's life. Her inability to compromise is the destruction of her and her family. So in what way does this relate to children of war?

ZW: David Leveaux [the director of Electra] had seen a documentary film about children in Bosnia, and it became the emotional inspiration for the production. The film was about a little girl who would not communicate with anyone; the only time she would speak was when she visited the grave of her dead brother. For me, the connection between this film and Electra is the idea of a damaged character. I had to understand how to get inside an arrested human being. Now, I have a sibling who is arrested emotionally, and the deaths of my parents [actors Sam Wanamaker and Charlotte Holland] have restrained her. Electra, too, is arrested. The play is an examination of the crippling of a human being.

JH: In the play everyone begs you to see the other side of the argument. To stop the cycle of vengeance that is destroying the House of Atreus.

ZW: That's what's brilliant about Sophocles. He starts the play with one argument. You are given the child-woman, Electra, and you feel sorry for her. Then her sister comes on and says, "Why will you not learn? Why will you not compromise?" And then you are introduced to the so-called villain of the piece, Clytemnestra, who says to Electra, "Your father killed my child." So the audience suddenly hears another argument.

JH: Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the gods in order to get his ships to Troy and win the Trojan War, so Clytemnestra kills him out of vengeance, though in a slightly compromised way because she is helped by her lover.

ZW: Yes. But, then, Agamemnon was not exactly a clean sheet of paper, either. He screwed a lot of people.

JH: It's a riveting story, the essence of which we can surely recognize in ourselves. Mother love, father love, righteousness, vengeance - we all have these feelings, even though we may not admit them. It shows you the power of good drama.

ZW: And Frank McGuinness has done a wonderful adaptation. He's pared Sophocles down to a fish bone. He's left out the extraneous gods and goddesses. He has condensed long sentences into raw, muscular, unembroidered language.

JH: What do you think happens to Electra in the end?

ZW: In the myth she goes on to marry and have children, but at the end of this production I think she's in pursuit of beauty.

JH: She is?

ZW: Yes. Life was beautiful before her father died, and it's the return to beauty that she has always wanted. That return was denied her, and after sixteen years of misery, what does she have left? Nothing. Just her revenge. But depression has become Electra's state of being. And there are people who actually want to be depressed. A long time ago I used to go to a shrink I absolutely adored, and his idea was that some people enjoy depression. He found it difficult to get people to stop the habit of depression and become optimistic. Because it's easier to be depressed. It's harder to be happy.