I would feel entirely inadequate in reviewing a play by Sophocles that is over 2,000 years old. The Greeks were the originators of theater. The plot, the emotion and the human conditions embodied in this drama are as valid and true today as they were in ancient Greece. I will only report my feelings as I sat in a NYC theater watching Electra.

The curtain rises and the stage is black and white. The set is dark and foreboding. Eeriness follows Electra as she makes her pathetic entrance onto the stage. Played to perfection by Zoe Wanamaker, Electra drags herself around the stage in a disheveled state. Her scalp has large scabs and is bloodstained. In a state of mourning, she drags around her father's military coat every place into which she moves.

Electra's father, King Agamemnon, has been murdered. Electra vows that she will avenge her father's death with the help of her brother, Orestes.

My mind jumped immediately to Shakespeare's Hamlet. The central characters of these two eponymous tales have been victimized. Each of their fathers has been murdered. Each of their mothers was involved in the plot. The murderers have subsequently married their mothers and are sleeping in the marriage beds of their slain fathers.

Hamlet's father's ghost cries out to him on the battlements of Elsinore Castle, pleading for revenge on Claudius, his murderer. As for his wife Gertrude, the ghost requests, "Leave her to Heaven." Young Hamlet eventually completes his father's request, but both he and his mother become victims in the final act.

Electra, unlike Hamlet, is self-motivated. Like Hamlet, she cries out desperately for revenge. Doom and gloom fill the Ethel Barrymore Theater as she relates her sad tale of murder.

When Clair Bloom enters the stage, electricity (no pun intended) fills the theater. She is Queen Clytemnestra, Electra's mother. She is wearing a crimson gown, redder that almost anything I can remember. It is the first color to be seen on stage. (I was once fortunate enough to have seen Cardinal O'Connor in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral during a parade. That Cardinal Red was the intense color of Clytemnestra's robe.)

Clair Bloom was "kick-in-the-chest" beautiful. Sitting in the orchestra of the theater, I realized that a single woman's beauty and bearing can enthrall and capture the entire viewing audience. I remember Miss Bloom in her youth in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. In her middle age she is no less beautiful, no less captivating and no less regal. I was stunned.

The stage trembled as Electra and her mother landed verbal barrages on each other.

Bright red appears again on the set when Orestes kills his mother and his hands and forearms are covered with her blood.

As the play ended, I felt deeply sympathetic for Electra and Hamlet. Each one was rendered helpless to combat a desire for revenge and justice.

Were they correct or right in seeking what we today call "closure?"

Both of their lives were destroyed by vengeance.