ABSTRACT
Approximately one hundred years ago, at the Kleines Theater Berlin, a memorable performance took place: the première of Max Reinhardt’s production of Sophocles’ Electra, adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, on 30 October 1903. The part of Electra was played by Gertrud Eysoldt. Since the opening of the season 1902/03 at the Kleines Theater, Eysoldt had played Henriette (in Strindberg’s Ecstasy), Salome (in Oscar Wilde’s play), Lulu (in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit) and Nastja (in Maxim Gorki’s The Lower Depths). In all these productions, she both enchanted and shocked audiences and critics alike by an intense display of corporeality which seemed to express and create something which had never been expressed or created on stage before, something which had evaded any kind of language, or conventional, standardized, formalized movements, gestures, postures or attitudes till then. It was after having seen Gertrud Eysoldt as Nastja when the Kleines Theater toured to Vienna that Hugo von Hofmannsthal promised, at a breakfast he had together with Reinhardt and Eysoldt a few days later, to rewrite Sophocles’ Electra for both.
