Synopsis Tragic epic. Portrait of a powerful woman torn apart by sexual obsession. Phaedra is a woman stricken with a blind, all consuming love for a young man half her age. Her step-son. She struggles to reconcile her uncontrollable desire with her duty and obligations as a wife, mother and public figure.
The rescheduled press night for Phaedra, starring triple Olivier Award winner Clare Higgins, took place at the Donmar Warehouse on Friday (21 April 2006). The production was due to start performances on Thursday 6 April, but instead, that day saw the sudden departure of Paul Nicholls, who had to withdraw from the role of Hippolytus on medical advice (See News, 7 Apr 2006). As there are no understudies at the 250-seat Donmar, the first week’s performance had to be cancelled before Nicholls was replaced by Ben Meyjes (See News, 10 Apr 2006).
For some critics, it was well worth the wait as a tour-de-force performance by Higgins in the title role in Frank McGuinness’ new version of Racine’s 1677 piece of classical tragedy (directed and designed by Tom Cairns) stole the show. However, some were less impressed with the translation and staging.
The king is missing, presumed dead. His warrior son is braced for inheritance but is betrayed by his heart. Phaedra, the tormented queen, has a terrifying secret that will shake Athens to its core. Based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, Racine’s Phaedra reveals the devastating potential of love and the brutality of human nature. The cast also features Sean Campion, Michael Feast and Linda Bassett, as well as Marcella Plunkett, Lucy-Anne Holmes and Janet Whiteside.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com - “Racine’s glorious, rolling verse reflects the sonorous, doom-laden situation… McGuinness rejects the tradition of rendering Racine’s 12-syllable alexandrines into Shakespearean ten-syllable iambics, fracturing Racine’s majestic classicism with a busy hotchpotch of sawn-off blank verse, staccato phrases and idiomatic slang.” And he was baffled by the title performance by “the estimable Clare Higgins” who plays Phaedra “as a crazy gypsy fortune-teller…. Her state of hallucinatory mental illness is immediately transparent. And that’s the problem: the performance is complete before it’s begun.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “Phaedra offers 100 minutes of theatre at its purest and most savagely intense. The production's secret weapon is Clare Higgins… She is, I venture to suggest, the greatest British actress we now have when it comes to communicating overwhelming tragic emotion on stage…. Every speech, every gesture seems to be dragged from Higgins's heart and guts.” He commented that the actress “receives outstanding support” from the hastily drafted in Ben Meyjes as Hippolytus but was less happy about the translation’s “occasional jarring modernisms, such as ‘top yourself’ and ‘done the dirty’”.
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard - Contrary to Spencer, De Jongh couldn’t have been less impressed with the “jarring dissonances of the production”. He complained: “It requires a rare talent to convert Phèdre, Racine's masterpiece of 17th-century French tragedy, into a piece of theatre that sometimes sounds as if aspiring to become a Channel Five soap opera.” According to De Jongh, Higgins’ “woe-begone” title character “might be suffering the hangover blues after a heavy night out on London town rather than nursing an unrequited passion for her stepson in ancient Greece.” He concluded: “Bathos intrudes. Metaphors are mixed, language is sometimes incoherent… Racine has been ravished rather than revived.”
Lyn Gardner in the Guardian - Despite misgivings about the video-heavy design, Gardner deemed this “an evening of real potential” with the “finest ingredients” including Frank McGuinness’ new version that “cuts across the 17th-century rhetoric like a razor blade to deliver up a sharply contemporary script” and a cast led by Clare Higgins, who is “arguably the most recklessly exciting actress of her generation”.
Benedict Nightingale in the Times - “It’s time that Higgins took her place at the top table beside our greatest actresses, for she has more capacity for malevolence than Judi Dench, the inner darkness that distinguishes Eileen Atkins, and as much power as Fiona Shaw. Here, she suggests that a civil war is occurring inside herself.… If there’s a more impressively unsentimental performance in town — desperate, vulpine, almost slatternly — I don’t know it.”
There are two virtually insoluble problems at the heart of any attempt to revive Jean Racine’s 1677 declamatory French masterpiece. First, how do we understand the mythological and supernatural elements in a tragedy where the heroine is a victim of heredity, descended from the sun and half-sister to the Minotaur? Her adulterous (half-incestuous) passion for her stepson, Hippolytus, whose mother was an Amazonian queen, is a direct consequence of this.
Secondly, Racine’s glorious, rolling verse reflects the sonorous, doom-laden situation at the court. Only one translation in recent years, that of Robert David MacDonald for Glenda Jackson’s performance in Glasgow and at the Old Vic, came close to approximating the doleful, soulful tread of the music.
At the Donmar, Irish playwright Frank McGuinness rejects the tradition of rendering Racine’s 12-syllable alexandrines into Shakespearean ten-syllable iambics, fracturing Racine’s majestic classicism with a busy hotchpotch of sawn-off blank verse, staccato phrases and idiomatic slang.
This is interesting enough, but it simply isn’t Racine. Nor is the emphatic undertow of Catholic guilt sufficient compensation for the almost total lack of emotional grandeur. Racine does not sound like Racine without the tensile pull between modesty and madness.
The dying queen, who seeks to die with her secret intact but who is drawn to fateful confession, is played by the estimable Clare Higgins as a crazy gypsy fortune-teller. She's much wilder and more sensual than her recent English predecessors in the role, Diana Rigg and the late Sheila Gish. Her state of hallucinatory mental illness is immediately transparent. And that’s the problem: the performance is complete before it’s begun.
Racine’s version of the story is far more “accessible” to us than its sources in Euripides and Seneca. In the captured beauty, Aricia (a sweetly subdued Marcella Plunkett), with whom Hippolytus (a ruffled, simpering Ben Meyjes, replacing the indisposed Paul Nicholls at short notice) has fallen in love, Racine creates a new dimension in the tangle of passion and secrecy.
Tom Cairns, directing and designing in the manner of his mentor, Philip Prowse (who directed the Jackson production), places the action in an airless grey palace, a circular skylight hinting at the gods and elements beyond, with some fleeting filmed images of scudding clouds and rampaging horses.
Linda Bassett and Janet Whiteside maintain an air of fussing anxiety around the queen. Michael Feast as the returning king Theseus – reports of his demise have been exaggerated - and Sean Campion as the wide-eyed narrator of the spectacular death of Hippolytus, both convey an easy, downmarket sense of familiarity. But making Racine “natural” is both a fool’s errand and an admission of defeat.
What's unusual about Racine's take on Greek tragedy is that all the action happens offstage ! Frank McGuinness' adaptation is excellent, where many modern adaptations seem trite and tacky. Tom Cairns staging is simple, allowing the story to unfold without too much 'business' getting in the way. There isn't a weak link in an excellent ensemble, led of course by the wonderful Clare Higgins, who continues to thrill in everything she does. It isn't the magical night Hecuba was here at the Donmar, but that's probably because it isn't such a good play. But you have to go and see it none the less. - 86.130.201.183)
30 May 06
Overall I loved it. I thought some of the modernized language a bit anachronistic, with a bit too much use of idiom ('fall for the scam', 'top yourself' etc.). However, this was insignificant, and totally offset by the fantastic performances. Is there anything that Clare Higgins cannot do? There was no weak link in the supporting cast, either. This was my first 'attempt' at Greek tragedy, so I was relieved that the production was so accessible and believable. I shall be trying others in the future, though it'll be difficult for future productions to live up to this one. - 86.140.86.67)
18 May 06
It is certainly worth reading the programme notes before seeing this production as it's useful to have a degree of background knowledge about the characters and plot. There is certainly alot to enjoy in Tom Cairn's visually handsome production. Frank McGuinness rejects the Alexandrine verse format of the original Racine and instead presents a spare, eloquent, sometimes beautiful, occasionally jarringly anachronistic script. The costumes are elegant and timeless, and the use of doomladen sound effects and projections is powerful. Modern audiences may have a slight problem with the declamatory, histrionic nature of the piece but that is not the fault of this fine cast. The Irish voices of Sean Campion and Marcella Plunkett suit McGuinness' prose style perfectly, and there are superb supporting performances from Michael Feast's outraged Theseus and Linda Bassett as Phaedra's desperate right hand woman. Ben Meyjjes as Hippolytus starts uncertainly but is ultimately convincing and moving. Rightly dominating the show is Clare Higgins as a completely magnificent Phaedra: earthy, sexy, and clearly in terrible trouble, she inhabits the role fully and is clearly unafraid of expressing the uglier aspects of the character; that said, she has seldom looked more gorgeous. She makes a wonderful job of this most difficult of heroines. - 195.82.123.181)
24 Apr 06
On reading the programme note on the complex background to the events in Racine's tragedy Phaedra (presented here in a version by Frank McGuinness and seen in preview) you may feel you need a degree in classical studies to understand it all. But fear not – the play itself contains sufficient information on the situations faced by its principal characters at the start to make the action itself perfectly comprehensible!
The essential points are that Theseus (the King of Athens and a great warrior but with a reputation as a philanderer) has been absent for six months on a quest to the Underworld from which he is not expected to return and that the Athenian succession is complicated not only by there being a number of candidates – three of his own sons and Aricia, the daughter of one of his uncles – but by the stresses and strains which exist in the relationships between various members of the family.
His eldest son, Hippolytus (whose mother was Antiope, an Amazonian queen) and his current wife, Phaedra, have apparently always existed in a state of mutual animosity, hardly being able to bear the sight of each other, whilst Theseus himself, although he spared Aricia when defeating and killing her father and brothers, detests her and keeps her a prisoner, having forbidden her ever to marry. An added complication arises at the start of the play when Hippolytus admits to having fallen for Aricia, but the proximate cause of the tragedy is that Phaedra is herself turns out to have been secretly in love with Hippolytus. On learning this, he is shocked and disgusted, and rejects her in no uncertain terms, an action which might not have had such devastating consequences for all concerned had not Theseus, against all the odds, actually returned.
The tragedy is played out on a largely bare stage, adorned by a single statue and with a white gauze backdrop onto which images of palace walls and rolling waves are projected. This setting was designed by the production's director, Tom Cairns, and the costumes – essentially "timeless modern" – by Amy Roberts, and atmospheric music by Ben and Max Ringham accompanies the piece.
The production revolves around a fine performance by Clare Higgins as Phaedra, whose love for Hippolytus ultimately results not only in his death but also in her own self-destruction. But special mention must also be made of Ben Meyjes, who had taken over the role of Hippolytus at very short notice when the actor originally cast became ill. Despite having had only had three days of rehearsals, and having performed the role only once, before I saw the production, he not only displayed a remarkable command of the vast majority of his lines but also captured the essence of the character, whose loss as a potential ruler of Athens is all the more tragic since he shares his father's innate capacity for heroism without also having inherited his faults.
- 194.75.129.200)
Re-opened in 1992. Seats 254. 1999 - Ambassador Theatre Group takes over from the Associated Capital Theatres as the landlord of the Donmar Warehouse. 2002 - Michael Grandage succeeds Sam Mendes as Artistic Director of the Donmar. Nick Frankfort succeeds Caro Newling as Executive Producer.
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