Exhibition themes Elektra ballet

Elektra: Acting Up & Flying High

Arthur Boyd’s set and costume designs for Robert Helpmann’s ballet Elektra appeared on the London stage at Covent Garden in 1963. Helpmann, well established as a daring choreographer, had met his match in Boyd when it came to the distillation of human passions for the adaptation of the Greek tragedy—a dark tale in which Elektra seeks retribution for the murder of her father by her mother Clytmnestra and her mother’s lover Aegisthus.

Boyd came up with a dramatic overall conception: massive black and white images suggestive of states of being, a blood-red floorcloth and bold costume designs painted on body stockings. His sets included two side screens and three movable backdrops based on his black and white etchings and conté crayon drawings, which were blown up on a huge scale and painted under Boyd’s supervision.

The costume designs came out of a series of lively drawings shown in this exhibition space. Although Boyd felt disappointed that some early drawings were censored, the essence of his approach was retained as remarkable photographs by Axel Poignant reveal. However when the ballet was performed in Australia, Boyd was asked to come up with purely black and white costumes in keeping with the backdrops.

At the conclusion of the London premiere in March 1963, the audience erupted into applause. As Richard Buckle wrote in The Sunday Times:

‘The applause seemed to last longer than the ballet … The sets of Arthur Boyd, Australia’s Chagall, must be seen: they are a shot in the arm.’