Chris Wallace: Old Vic is ready for a new approach

On arrival the signs were promising. The Old Vic auditorium was in an in-the-round configuration. The stage had been pulled out and seats installed, encircling the newly created performance space in the middle. Sitting in the old stage area one got an actor's eye view of the theatre one would normally never experience, and a sense of just how physically imposing facing an audience in raked seats topped by tier after tier of balconies must be.

Yet the in-the-round configuration produced a relatively small, flat and intimate stage on which the first two rows of seats directly sat. KST, as Kristin Scott Thomas fans call her, was right there in front of you, roaming a stony grey set which derived power from its very simplicity. KST occupied that stage for just over 100 performances before the play's run ended on December 20. The reviews were ecstatic. The reality was somewhat different.

The play is driven by Electra's grief over, and desire to avenge, her mother's murder of her father Agamemnon - something in turn driven by Agamemnon's decision to sacrifice Electra's sister, Iphigenia, as an offering the gods require to clear the Greek fleet's passage to Troy. Electra waits for her brother Orestes to avenge her father's murder by killing their mother and mother's lover. The Old Vic Electra was Irish playwright Frank McGuinness's version of the Sophocles classic. The McGuinness play premiered to acclaim at London's Donmar Warehouse in 1997 starring Zoe Wanamaker, and subsequently toured to America.

There are plenty of other versions. Canadian poet Anne Carson's, for example, contains the distinctive screams Sophocles writes for Electra which seem missing from McGuinness's text. "It is not easy to decide what gives the screaming of Electra its power," Carson writes in the foreword to her translation, referring to the distinctive "language of lament" Sophocles made up for Electra out of "bones of sound". Carson goes on to list the 14 different screams Sophocles endows her with in the play. "In range and diversity of aural construction Electra surpasses all other screamers in Sophocles," she writes, "including Philoctetes who suffers from gangrene in the foot and Heracles who gets burned alive at the end of his play." It is Greek drama. There are no half measures.

Yes, Electra is one of the most anguished characters in the Western tradition. But at last month's Old Vic performances, some in the audience felt something approaching anguish over KST's acting. Reviews in the London daily papers had heaped every superlative upon it, but the truth is KST was melodramatic rather than dramatic, and took anguish to the verge of the histrionic.

It is hard to understand why director Ian Rickson would allow the star of his production to deliver a performance that excluded all light and shade. Extraordinarily, KST towards the end seemed at times to play it for laughs. At first one felt embarrassed for the audience, attributing their laughter perhaps to ignorance about the drama and pain the play embodies. When it kept happening, however, and when KST at times even hammed things up discreetly, it became obvious it was deliberate. Had she become so bored with her own one-note performance that she had to milk the audience for laughs as a distraction?

It didn't seem to matter in the end. The adoring crowd gave her a standing ovation - most of them, anyway. They had come to see KST and it seems it didn't really matter what she did, they were going to adore her. It was an "emperor's new clothes" moment. Sonia Friedman Productions, which produced Electra in conjunction with the Old Vic, is mounting Hamlet at the Barbican with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead next year. Let's hope he doesn't decide to throw in a few comedy cracks during his "Alas, poor Yorick" soliloquy.

Meantime Kevin Spacey's 11-year run as Old Vic artistic director is coming to an end, and film and theatre director Matthew Warchus will succeed him this year. Warchus transformed Roald Dahl's Matilda into a hit musical, and directed Pride, whose cinema run happily continues into 2015. If Electra is anything to go by, the Old Vic is ready for a new approach. Warchus looks like just the ticket.