JEAN Racine's Phedre (derived from Euripides's Hyppolytus) has had a variable history of flop and triumph since first staged in 1677 and, despite its high academic reputation as its author's finest work, has been seldom staged in the English language theatre.
Derek Mahon's new, and sharply vigorous, translation is therefore to be unreservedly welcomed, even if its many effective colloquialisms are sometimes interrupted by patches of poetry that are difficult to deliver conversationally.
Racine's Jansenist inversion of the original Greek fable, whereby the gods become the invented servants of human desires and stupidities rather than the heavenly determinants of human behaviour (consonant, as it were, with the notion that man invented God rather than God creating man) is nicely accented both in the text and in John Crowley's daringly static staging of the drama.
We watch Phaedra's precipitate sexual lunge towards her step son Hippolytus, urged on by her faithful but foolish servant Oenone on the basis of unreliable in formation that husband Theseus has died overseas, knowing that her actions will lead to disaster in a hypocritical society where honour (alias reputation) counts for more than virtue.
We watch Theseus's stupid responses, on his return, to Oenone's dishonest account of what may have transpired between Hippolytus and Phaedra, knowing that his invocation of Poseidon's wrath must end in the destruction of his son by a monster embodying jealousy. And the narrative is, for the most part, theatrically persuasive in Giles Cadle's beautifully spare Mediterranean setting. John Crowley's direction might usefully have given everything a little more time and bit more physical elaboration: there is too often a sense of rush and physical separation which tends to diminish the possibility of a more intimate expression of emotions.
Michael Byrne's technically perfect interpretation of a stiff and unyielding Theseus suffers most from the sense of rush and distance and loses dramatically in the end because the ram rod is maintained where a break down might have been more theatrically effective. Stephen Kennedy's Hippolytus manages the emotional content best, even if his strong northern accent sticks out awkwardly from an otherwise relatively bland accentuation from the rest of his family. But then his is an awkwardly honest character in this society.
The performance of the night, however, is Dearbhla Molloy's intelligent tormented Phaedra. Even if she never manages the anorexic appearance that the text demands, she best embodies the passion and the intellect, the inverted romanticism and the timeless human contradictions, that are at the heart of this play. This is a major performance not to be missed.
Ingrid Craigie is the driven Oenone, Gerard McSorley the upright Theramenes (tutor of Hippolytus and most impressively, the deliverer to Theseus: of the tale of how his son died) and Siobhan Miley is (largely due to the script and the direction) a somewhat innocuous Aricia, the princess with whom Hippolytus was really in love, the ultimately lethal rival to his stepmother in law.
