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Phedre Old Fire Station until Saturday 10th February 2001 Seventeenth century French drama is available this week at the OFS in the shape of Racine's Phedre, part of the Turl Street Arts Festival. Tyrnian Productions, dedicated to bringing womencentred classics to Oxford (they did Antony & Cleopatra and Antigone last year) are offering a powerful version of this classic story of incest and revenge directed by Rob Crumpton. The eponymous heroine was recently played by Diana Rigg, Professor of Theatre at Oxford, and while this student version lacks her subtlety, it has lost none of the passion. From the moment we engage with Phedre (Nicole Scott) and her doomed love for Hippolytus (Alastair Sooke), the audience is pulled into the maelstrom that is the psychologies of these royals. The plot makes the marital difficulties of the Windsors seem tame. Phedre is a Queen with a problem: her philandering husband, Theseus (Prasanna Puwanarajah), is missing and thought dead, and she is harbouring a forbidden lust for his son, Hippolytus. Being Medea's sister, selfcontrol does not run in Phedre's family - she proclaims herself tortured by Venus. But it's not all down to divine machinations. We discover that while she has had Hippolytus banished, they are now thrown together due to war. Hippolytus' enforced absence has made him a stranger to his father, and he suffers emotionally from the loss of human contact. In addition, Phedre is dominated by her nanny Oenone (Lauren Bloom) who could give Cruella de Ville lessons in nastiness. Throw in one not so helpless maiden Aricia (Jill Crawford), the only surviving member of Theseus' greatest enemy with whom Hippolytus is dangerously in love, and you have the making of two and a half hours of on the edge of your seat melodrama. Great care has been taken with details. The costumes and set (Amy Levene) are lovely, and the music (Tom Foster-Carter) haunting in its lyricism. Ted Hughes' stunningly visceral translation flows easily from the tongue and into the ear this is a poet who understands these raw passions with consummate ease. While some of the play's meaning might be lost on modern audiences its emphasis on royal honour and its belief in gods and monsters what it does convey convincingly is how unrequited passion can torture its sufferers. When great actresses like Rigg take the part, they tend to portray the agony of an older woman obsessed with a younger man. This production chooses to show how a young woman married to an older man can fall in love with a stepson her own age. It is a different kind of story, but equally heartrending. The most fascinating relationship in the play for me, however, is that between Phedre and Oenone this is the true "marriage" of individuals, formed by needs and choices, which reveals all the hidden evils of the human heart more savagely than the romantic entanglements can. Racine's play's longevity rests on the realisation that when you leave the theatre, you will be forced to think about who and what you love in a more realistic way than you had before you entered. Kathleen Fenty, 6 / 2 / 01 |