Phedre

26/06/2009

Helen Mirren thrills in NT live broadcast @ Pavilion Cinema, Galashiels

Pavilion Cinema, Galashiels
4/5

Kicking off the National Theatre's innovative series of live broadcasts, tonight's production of Racine's 'Phèdre' is a turbulent and thrilling experience. With Dame Helen Mirren in the title role, this retelling of the myth of Phaedra, wife of Theseus (Minotaur-slayer), is swollen with unthinkable urges, deceit, poisons, carnage, obsession. Every unravelling thread must be picked and pulled till a monster is lured from its labyrinth: Phèdre's forbidden desire for her stepson, Hippolytus; his equally disastrous love of Aricia.

The play's opening night in 1677 was not a success. Vindictive supporters of Racine's rival, Corneille, bought up tickets and left their seats glaringly empty.

Thankfully, in Galashiels, the rows are filling up nicely. I find myself seated between two primary school teachers and an elderly, besuited gent: not the sorts usually spied nibbling popcorn in the Pavilion.

Here, in this English translation by Ted Hughes, Racine's rhyming couplets are ditched in favour of highly-charged, symbolic language: a looser poetry. It can be heard in the actors' enunciation of certain alliterative lines: 'bound in bonds he cannot break'.

Despite director Nicholas Hytner's words to the contrary, I'm certain the players are ever-conscious that beyond their theatre audience, beyond the cameras, thousands are gathered in darkened rooms across the world, watching. There's a frisson, an extra charge, to these performances: a tension between projecting to the room and the more subtle gestures of the cinematic close-up.

The score, set design and lighting likewise create an evocative backdrop for the mythic themes: 'Eraserhead'-like drones and crescendos; the stark azure of a mediterannean sky; pale hues of marble, sand, wood, rockface, darkening as the unforgiving Sun drops into Poseidon's Ocean somewhere off-stage.  

The dreamlike image of girlish Aricia (Ruth Negga) dragging the bloodied remains of her lover across the stage will stay with me. 

ROGER SIMIAN