Janet McTeer blazes in Simon Stone’s Greek tragedy-inspired new play
“Maybe this is our curse, I hope to God not”
It’s proper there within the credit for Phaedra – “a new play by Simon Stone, after Euripides, Seneca and Racine” – it’s in the end Greek tragedy-adjacent however it’s actually a chopping, up to date drama that has as a lot comedy because it does Chorus. It’s a small adjustment of expectation required however one which pays dividends as Stone’s slick manufacturing revolves on the Lyttelton stage.
Housed in Chloe Lamford’s spinning glass home, the world of this Phaedra – renamed right here as Helen – is the moneyed London elite, blithely on present to one and all. Helen is a shadow minister, married to diplomat Hugo and the banter with their precocious children is one thing to behold in a extremely verbose opening scene which introduces the partaking however considerably poisonous household dynamic.
Matters are difficult with the arrival of Sofiane, the son of Helen’s Moroccan former lover who died in a automotive crash. Just a boy when it occurred, he’s now the age that lover was when he died and that awakens one thing deep throughout the self-involved Helen, who then throws herself right into a monumentally harmful affair, the far-reaching impression of which shatters the worlds of so many in her orbit.
Janet McTeer is phenomenal as Helen, a post-menopausal girl relishing this sexual reawakening and unconcerned with its potential ramifications. Paul Chahidi mines a tragicomic vein completely because the long-suffering Hugo, coping with his personal identification points; Mackenzie Davis shimmers as their grownup daughter Isolde, struggling in a wedding the place everybody loves her husband aside from her; and French-Moroccan Assaad Bouab is swarthily efficient as Sofiane, barely coping with the turbulence from assembly the lady so concerned in his emotional and sexual growth as a boy and her daughter who appears eerily like her mum did again then…
Stone’s script is splendidly, bitingly savage as numerous configurations of those characters tear lumps out of one another however there’s a slight sense of an overstuffed grab-bag of themes which aren’t essentially all totally fleshed out. And given how the restaurant scene that precedes it’s jet black-comedy at its best (clock the child recording it on his cellphone!), the way in which the ultimate scene pivots into full-on Greek tragedy doesn’t fairly land, regardless of the ferocious multilingual brilliance of Sirine Saba’s work and gorgeous visuals.
Lamford’s design is awesomely good, and brilliantly wrangled by the stage administration group – her glass cage reworking from London residing rooms to rural reedbeds, Birmingham bedsits and Moroccan mountainsides – the essentially prolonged scene adjustments coated by atmospheric voiceovers from Sofiane’s deceased father providing his personal perspective on the previous. It won’t fairly have the soul-crushing brilliance of his Medea or Yerma however with Janet McTeer blazing on the head of this very good forged, Simon Stone’s Phaedra earns its place with the opposite interpretations of this enduring fable.