Power. Betrayal. Lust. Blood. Fate. These, and more, are the threads that weave the tale of Electra. 

The story centers on the house of Agamemnon, whose patriarch has been murdered by the usurper Aegisthus, in collusion with Agamemnon’s wife Clytaemnestra, as revenge for sacrificing their child Ipheginia to the Gods in return for safe passage to the Trojan War. It is now many years later. Orestes, the only son of Agamemon and Clytaemnestra, has been banished from Argos, on pain of death and Electra, the only remaining daughter, has been married off to a peasant, in order to prevent her from giving birth to a noble son who can avenge Agamemnon’s murder. But what Aegisthus doesn’t know is that Orestes has just returned from exile, told by an Oracle to avenge his father’s murder, and that Electra’s marriage has never been consummated - she is still a virgin, and thus a danger to him as well. Together brother and sister work to fulfill the bloody wishes of the gods.    

A young woman meets her grandmother for the first time in the hospital where her estranged mother, a rich, successful chemist and the CEO of a multinational pharmaceutical, has just been admitted with life-threatening injuries after falling (or did she jump? or was she pushed?) out of her office window. It’s a dystopian tale of a brilliant-but-flawed Millennial, set against the backdrop of a world descending into a neo-fascist hell-scape. 

In this play populism has run amok. Women still have some rights, but fewer rights than men, and even they don’t have as many rights as they used to. Labour laws, minority rights, and the social safety net are gone. Healthcare is something you buy from a hospital. The play traces the inter-connected lives of these three women as the world changes, and their ability or inability to respond to it. Maid of Stone ultimately asks us to make a decision, not about whether or not we will resist evil forces in a darkening world, but about whether or not we will care for each other, and ourselves, enough to make resistance even possible.