Review: PHAEDRA, National Theatre

If you are stuck for Valentine's Day plans The National Theatre have you sorted. Why not treat your other half to a vicious tragedy where hot blooded jealousy and ferocious lust rule supreme? It will get hearts pumping, but certainly not because of the romance.

It's technically an adaptation, but writer-director Simon Stone takes bold liberties splicing the DNA of Seneca's Roman tragedy. He is surgical but brutal in his approach, carving a fresh psychological core that grounds the ancient themes in contemporary morality. Propped up with powerhouse performances, this Phaedra is a savage beauty as terrifying as it is tragic.

Here Phaedra is Helen, a self-assured politician. Her affluent family home in Holland Park is a crystal fortress for her to shelter inside, a revolving glass box designed by Chloe Lamford. All seems ideal but the fault lines are there; the sudden appearance of her ex-lover's son Sofiane (standing in for Hippolytus) sends the psychosexual tremors rumbling. Soon everything shatters and shards of fractured relationships and twisted emotions fly left right and centre. By the end the glass box that once protected them now suffocates them.

The sexual is very much political as Helen's infatuation with the Moroccan Sofiane is entrenched in her waspish post-colonial swagger. She is a sexual conqueror objectifying the foreign man through her blue-eyed gaze. Her oafish yet doting husband Hugo is emasculated, and her family are side-lined in the name of raw sexual desire.

It's still thrilling to watch her psychology unravel synapse by synapse but it's the production's Achilles heel. Stone is too eager to deconstruct her snooty elitism, in doing so casting a weighty judgement on Helen instead of leaving culpability ambiguous. Helen May mask herself in a vapour of social justice as a politician, but the stench of her cultural arrogance is overwhelming. She is too much a vindictive villain rather than a victim of fate for the sweet spot of murky moral greyness to blossom.

With that said it's worth seeing just for the birthday party confrontation where all the grubby secrets and cruel lies emerge into the cold light. As it descends into a ruthless barrage of shouting and repressed emotions the audience can do nothing but laugh to conceal their gaping horror at the emotional cataclysm unfolding. Even a psychoanalyst would shudder with shock.

Performances are hypnotisingly untheatrical, navigating the deliberately cluttered dialogue effortlessly. Janet McTeer's Helen undulates from smug confidence to spine chilling desperation. By the end she is broken, scuttling around her glass cage with vermin-like tenacity. It's easy to see why she is enamoured with Assaad Bouab's gleefully mystifying performance as Sofiane.

But for all the understated hypernaturalism, the set design pulls in a different direction. Technically marvellous scene changes (from lavish Holland Park to a stark field of wheat to a snow-covered mountain side) lean towards a more grandiose sense of theatricality. At best it's sometimes distracting and at worse aesthetically imperious.

The real hero is sound designer Stefan Gregory who amplifies every breathe, every animalistic pant, and every desperate gasp to garner an uncanny balance between immediacy and distance. It's the more subtle elements like that which burrow beneath the skin.

Phaedra plays at The National Theatre until 8 April

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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