Electra, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

When a potato-faced waif darts like an animal from its lair out of a thatched, shuttered cottage on a sandy seashore, it's clear that this Electra carries its own psychological freight.

When a potato-faced waif darts like an animal from its lair out of a thatched, shuttered cottage on a sandy seashore, it's clear that this Electra carries its own psychological freight. Jo Combes has bravely taken Sophocles' play - the plainest, least subjective of the ancient Greek versions of the story of the princess who avenges herself on her father's murderer - and made a radical new text.

Tying Electra in to Katie Mitchell's Second World War staging of Iphigenia at the National, Combes has developed an interesting idea. Electra was Iphigenia's sister, and since it would by now be seven years since their father Agamemnon returned from war, ancient Mycenae has become the Galway coast in the late 1950s, bloody murder justified by a religious as well as a moral context. Combes, directing as well as adapting, has concentrated on the stark simplicity of the tale instead of trying to capture any monumental aspects of the story's violent extremes.

Everyone acts as a foil to Electra who "makes no soliloquies to reveal herself". Penny Layden's fraught portrayal shows a self-mutilating young woman wound into a frenzy of hatred and hysteria of grief for her "darling Daddy". This maltreated creature relives the grisly death of her father at the hands of his wife, Nestra (Clytemnestra), and her lover Aengus (Aegisthus). Such is her contempt for the new regime in the household, her sister Chrissy warns her, that Aengus is contemplating despatching her to "a dark tower" far from her beloved sea, in a home for afflicted girls in Sligo.

Despite the constantly flickering candle-light from the shrine to Our Lady of Ballyvergan, and the almost spectral presence of Brigid, a Poor Clare nun who used to live in the farmhouse, the religious slant is the least successful element. However, the notion of female oppression in rural west Ireland with its shades of The Magdalene Sisters is timeless enough, as is the localising of the characters' names.

The arrival of the "friend" bearing news of the death of Electra's brother Restes, in a steeplechase in America whence he had fled, shatters her long-held hope that her brother would return and join her in a spot of matricide. The figure of her mother, Nestra (Stella McCusker), is seen silhouetted through the blinds, dancing with joy that her premonitions of death at her son's hand must be unfounded. Suddenly, Chrissy's news that there is evidence at their father's grave that Restes has been there changes the direction of the action yet again. As the sun rises, the play reaches its gut-wrenching conclusion and, as Chrissy spills the beans of their father's whore in England, it dawns on Electra that her beloved daddy wasn't entirely blameless. Her face screws up once more into the expression of crushed anguish that appears glued to it, as if she's already being pursued by the Furies of Ballyvergan.

To 9 April (0161-833 9833)