Once every three years there occurs a ‘Cambridge Greek Play’. The actors are taught to pronounce Greek, choirs to sing it and the audience to appreciate the tense and overblown family dramas of the original texts. It is a phenomenon that’s hard to translate into English, let alone re-create in the Corpus Playroom.

When I arrive at Kendrick’s home, the small cast of the upcoming Elektra production has already been here for about a week. Careful timetables reveal the tight rehearsal programs as well as the sheer amount of food that has been consumed during the making of the play. At one point I catch Kendrick’s mum restocking the biscuits. “Ellie had to plan over 300 breakfasts!” she tells me, laughing. So why the need to lock themselves up in Kent in the run-up to term?

This is a particularly different and difficult take on Sophocles’ Elektra: the translation they’re working from has been pronounced unfinished by many and unreadable by others, let alone stageable. It is not only liberal with its literal translation, but moves the entire action from Ancient Greece to the fields of the Deep South of America.

Ellie and I agree that similar modernisation has proved disastrous to these plays, but this is a strapping young girl fresh from the classical texts that all third year English students must study intensively, reluctantly or no and an appreciation of the original shows. It shows in the choice of translation particularly, which is that of Ezra Pound, one of the only modern poets that you would trust with classical Greek. It is a bit of a literary curio in itself, written while the poet was in a mental asylum, unpublished in his lifetime.

Kendrick admits that handling the text was a sensitive process: “Looking at what had been done with this translation before, it was treated as if everything in it, Pound’s use of Greek for one, was imperfect. But if you look closely you see that the moments where the Greek is put are those when Elektra is looking to the chorus for help. If you look at the way it’s put next to the English, and you read it out-loud, you can see how he’s trying to build up a dialogue – like a secret language between the character and the chorus, one that we’ve tried to maintain as much as possible.”“At first we asked Anthony Bowen to teach the cast the Greek parts of the play,” Kendrick recalls, referring to a classical language coach. Yet here Greek meter was not quite right. Much of the time in Kent has been spent working on original music that revives the chorus’ part in the play.

While the cast rehearses, I can hear snatches of a guitar that I assume belongs to Music Director, Hatty Carman, putting the finishing touches to a song. Summed up in Blues rhythms and some rich harmonies, they give the play a strength that’s different to the Greek but at the same time very much in a similar vein.  Roll on the spectacle and bloody murder! They are in surprisingly safe hands.