Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell, the Gate's outgoing artistic directors, have made quite a name for themselves and their venue.
Nick Payne's urgent new version of Sophocles's Electra is another in a long line of boundary-breaking offerings and thus an apt farewell production from Cracknell. For this is not Greek tragedy as Aristotle knew it but an astute study of a deeply disturbed family.
It's rather as if Sophocles had been reading Freud. Indeed, I was surprised that nobody accused the heroine of having an Electra complex, so unwaveringly does Payne home in on Electra's monomaniacal grief and rage about the murder of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra 10 years previously. Payne, one of our brightest new playwrights, has made a series of bold choices. Gone are unwieldy, distancing tragic traditions, notably the vacillating chorus and mythological language, in favour of clarity of speech and focus on the central characters. He also turns the narrative into a thriller, not a whodunit but a who's-going-to-do-it.
It's fitting, then, that this very 21st-century modern-dress Greek tragedy should be mounted not in some sweeping epic space but in a tight traverse staging. Seated just one deep on two sides of the auditorium, we the audience form an ad hoc chorus. The stylish, wordless opening montage has a young Electra - with whom her older self converses later - scrubbing Lady Macbeth-like at immovable blood stains.
Cath Whitefield is as intense as Electra should be, waiting longingly for the return of her brother Orestes (Alex Price) to right all wrongs.
It's not a part that allows for shading - although Payne gives it a final intriguing note of ambiguity - and Whitefield accordingly goes at it full tilt from line one. Natasha Broomfield gives some subtle nuance to the role of more "malleable" sister Chrysothemis and there's much to admire in Madeleine Potter's restrained tolerance of an implacable daughter who won't admit that maybe her mother had some justification. Electra-fying.
Until May 14. (020 7229 0706, gatetheatre.co.uk)
Electra
Gate Theatre
Pembridge Road (above the Prince Albert Pub), Notting Hill, W11 3HQ
