Electra is no Roxie Hart, a personable sexpot riding homicide to fame and fortune. As portrayed some 2400 years ago by Sophocles, the daughter of Agamemnon is dogged, reckless, and relentless in her remembrance of her slain father and her desire for revenge on his murderers. These are her own mother, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus, the lover Clytemnestra took while her husband was away on that longest business trip in Argive history, the conduct of the Trojan War. Electra, a thorn in the side because she cannot be a knife in the back, is not a fun girl. Although her stubborn resolve is portrayed as admirable, she is not easy to like or to play. And Serb actress Mirjana Jokovic, no stranger to the poisonous effects of long cycles of violence, does not shy from Electra’s pious, railing fanaticism. Performing the title role in Jonathan Wilson’s intense yet stately staging for Hartford Stage, the petite, booming actress is fragile and feral all at once, making it painfully clear that vengeance is not an altogether happy ending.

Wilson’s previous directorial efforts at Hartford Stage include a 2001 Oedipus Rex performed as a play within a play for African AIDS patients. But here the director sticks to tradition (and to a translation by British authority on all things Grecian H.D.F. Kitto), setting Sophocles’s tragedy before the ruined palace at Mycenæ where the embittered Electra skulks in the shadow of power. By turns lamenting her father’s fate, denouncing her murderous mother and her father’s usurper, condemning her more ameliorative sister Chrysothemis, and skirmishing with whoever ventures out of the blood-battered House of Atreus, she waits for her brother Orestes, whom she had spirited away for safekeeping, to return as avenging " champion. " Which, this day, he does.

Although the production occasionally falls prey to nostril-flaring posing, Wilson does not flinch from the graphic portrayal of bloody retribution, allowing Aegisthus to be murdered on stage before the title character, with a trembling little laugh, paints her face with blood from his torn belly. Sophocles is the only one of the Greek playwriting pantheon to portray the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus almost entirely as a ritual necessity. No Eumenides at once besiege Orestes, as they do in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. No such torment is predicted, as it is in Euripides’s Electra. Moreover, the reaction of the Chorus, at the end, is that the ailing House of Atreus has been shored up by the day’s events. So it falls to the production to supply blood lust and brutality, the sense that vengeance is as ugly as it is arguably just. And despite some earlier posturing, in the end this one does.

For one thing, American Repertory Theatre veteran Jokovic, whose part is huge if monochromatic, gives a fierce performance in which the hurt child co-exists with the avenging fury. Intensely physical, the performer, got up in sandals and a black criss-crossing of rags, her auburn hair a tangle, springs and crouches and allows herself to be rocked. Confronted with the false news of her brother’s death, she utters deep, chunky sobs that are almost like yodeling. And Jokovic’s odd-syllable-pounding Yugoslav accent (which marred her Hermione in the ART Winter’s Tale) just adds to the character’s adamancy. Throw in the Greek accent of the production’s lovely and logical Chrysothemis, Agnes Tsangaridou, and the exoticism seems passed around. The thin and chiseled Carmen Roman, in whose cool-customer Clytemnestra the brief flash of mourning for Orestes gives way to giddy relief, doesn’t need an accent to seem a hothouse flower beginning to wither. There are solid performances, too, from Gustave Johnson as the Tutor who has raised Orestes and Raphael Nash Thompson as a slyly if briefly authoritative Aegisthus. Stephen Barker Turner’s burly Orestes adds a soupçon of rejected child to his determined avenger.

In an ironic touch — since one of the ways in which Sophocles changed Greek drama was to increase the size of the Chorus — Wilson reduces the play’s Chorus of Mycenæan women sympathetic to Electra to one comforting adviser, who’s amply carried by Sheila McCarthy. (The director also eliminates Orestes’s friend Pylades, who has no lines.) Scott Bradley’s ash-and-metal setting is effectively burnt out, with one polished-marble ramp to suggest better times. And Jim Ragland’s score adds portent, even rumbles of thunder as the vengeful storm approaches, proving, in this production, that blood will have blood — and wear it, too.