Review: BRITANNICUS, Lyric Hammersmith

Atri Banerjee's production of Jean Racine's Britannicus is no Roman Holiday. With the wind of a new translation from Timberlake Wertenbaker in its sails, the production tries to channel the depth of a classical tragedy but with the sexy allure of a contemporary aesthetic.

Yet without a strong central performance to anchor it, the production ends up rudderless in a melodramatic muddle.

The set is stripped of any theatrical artifice except for a blown-up image of Peter Paul Rubens' Romulus and Remus. Strewn across the backwall it conspicuously parallels Britannicus, his half-brother Nero whose nefarious scheme to steal Britannicus' wife Junia kickstarts the downward vortex of violence that is the thrust of the narrative, and Nero's mother Agrippina who acts as the she-wolf pulling strings from the shadows.

None of this coheres with other creative choices, the most egregious and puzzling of which is an inexplicably present office water cooler. Actors hover around and drink from it with plastic cups seemingly for the sake of justifying its presence. It made for countless awkward giggle-eliciting moments dismantling any kind of dramatic tension. Putting a photocopier on stage would make as much sense.

The incoherence extends to the central performance; despite being washed across the publicity for Britannicus, Nathanial Curtis is the weak link in the otherwise strong cast. He struggled to paint an emotional portrait of the eponymous protagonist with an unrestrained performance straying too easily into adolescent histrionics and plastic physicality. All this became all the more apparent whenever he shared the stage with Shyvonne Ahmmad whose gorgeously fluid and often hypnotic performance as Junia added rich depth to her character's psychology. His inevitable demise at the hands of Nero couldn't come soon enough.

Fortunately, William Robinson's Nero was captivating. Whilst he had the potential to be truly unsettling, with his obnoxiously white tracksuit he strutted around the stage as a pompous brat and threw chair-kicking tantrums that would make Game of Thrones' King Joffrey cringe, but he just the missed the mark. Too quickly stripped of any sense of majesty, it was difficult to regard the tyrant as and genuinely threatening, more SoundCloud rapper than despotic dictator.

With that said, his scenes alongside Sirine Saba, whose powerhouse performance as the Machiavellian kingmaker Agrippina electrified the production, are the unquestionable highlights. Her commanding presence shrunk him to size as he clung to her legs like a toddler. Saba is aided by Wertenbaker's tight translation. The language is clean and precise, capturing the magnitude of classical tragedy but without becoming swampy or overly dense. Saba wields the language like ammunition firing it across the stage to create an image of a zealous power monger.

But as strong as the script and the supporting cast are, the die has already been cast. Without a stable central performance or unified creative vision, the production lacks concrete direction drifting from seriousness to silliness and back again at the drop of a hat. It is hard to understand what the creative team what their audience to take away from the production. On paper Britannicus is politically and dramatically fruitful, packed with questions about politics, gender, and power that are ripe for interpreting. But if there is if there is any commentary here it is lost in the fray.

Britannicus plays at The Lyric Hammersmith until 25 June.

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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