Twelve years after this was staged at the National Theatre it’s available to stream online until November 2021. Should you watch? If approaching with low expectations, I’d say go for it. Watch Helen Mirren reach and fail to grasp both the object of her obsession and the nuances in the Racine translation. Watch a young Dominic Cooper, fresh from the History Boys as the object of that obsession. Watch and decide for yourself if this production of Phedre is farcical, or fantastic.
REVIEW AS ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2009
If you checked out the booking page for Phedre yesterday, you’d have seen a plethora of returns stretching out across June & July. As one of 600+ people who were in the Lyttleton theatre Tuesday night, I can tell you this is no coincidence.
The safety curtain rises on one of the most beautiful sets I’ve ever seen – all rock and white marble, with one side of the stage a light box faithfully capturing the blue of an Aegean sky – (Bob Crowley & Paule Constable respectively).
Would that the play had matched its scenery.
We see Dominic Cooper – who is truly a fine figure of a man – almost immediately. He is the pivot around which all action unfolds, which might be why he spends most (if not all) of the the play re-acting, rather than acting. Cooper is actually one of the few who rise above what is a regrettable mess of melodrama to bring some believability to the production. But the play is too long, too overwrought, too melodramatic. And, oddly for a play which is supposed to be about love as a madness, utterly lacking in passion. Even the requited young love between Hippolytus and Aricia is a weak and stylized thing.
Helen Mirren’s Phedre is horrified at the love and lust in her heart – yes – but we only ever see her horror and remorse, never getting a sense of that lust or love. Instead, Mirren’s performance seems to both veer towards a reading of incipient madness, and yet flee back from that same interpretation. And in her co-conspirator/nurse Oenone (played by Margaret Tyzack whose body language far exceeded her dialogue delivery) there’s little more than ill-conceived gossip which aids and abets a woman’s delusion. There was precious little about Oenone’s motives in feeding Phedre’s folly – aside from love – and even less to explain her choice to dash herself on the Aegean rocks.
Director Nicholas Hytner seems to be aiming for some stratospheric level of catharsis, yet he dashes the play on rocks of bathos. What we’re left with is something that is comical where it should be tragic, something so melodramatically overblown that I reach for words such as farcical.
The truest moment in the play is, undoubtedly, the one in which Phedre reveals her feelings for Hippolytus to him. Here Mirren was desperate (though not passionately so) and Cooper magnificent, portraying his embarrassment and mortification by reaction alone. But it’s one of few scenes that rise above a dire production.
I left stunned, unable to fathom how bad it actually was. It should be interesting to read the reviews which appear in the press tomorrow.
Had a drink in the bar after the performance and so spotted Dominic Cooper departing with a shorter pony-tailed blonde, in red-ballet flats and black leggings. It later occurred to me that it’s the girl who was his love interest in Mama Mia – at least I think it was.
ETA: Reviews are in:
“Everyone’s very good. They’re just all acting in something very bad, a thoroughly traduced and reverentially presented “classic.” The acting is bloodless, all the gore used up on plastering the costumes late in the day. Phedre is supposed to be consumed by her own sunshine. Instead, Mirren opts for decorous restraint, as if suggesting that passion is best implied not spoken. That’s simply not what happens in Racine, and it’s so disastrous a misunderstanding that you begin to wonder if Hytner is still fully in control of his faculties, let alone the National Theatre.”
The Indepdent – Michael Covney
He gives the play 1 scant star; while in The Times Benedict Nightingale is of a completely different opinion writing:
[…from the moment Mirren crept onstage in a parody burka that veiled and swathed her entirely in purple, then crept out of it, an ashen moth desperate to stay in its cocoon, it was her evening.
He gives the play 4 stars.
Yes, I do believe both men were in the theatre earlier tonight and saw the same play grin.