Phaedra - NT 2023

I also saw this last night (the final preview, I think, so it should be locked in, and Simon Stone's daily rewrites should be over), and LOVED it! For me, it's a culture clash comedy, as well as a culture clash tragedy, so I think it intends to elicit the laughs it gets along the way: a very modern Phaedra!

The cast is universally wonderful!

Some spoilers follow. . .

The set features a shimmering glass cage trap, as in Simon Stone's "The Wild Duck," also similar to Stone's glass box in "Yerma," where it also felt like an examination room, with the audience in the position of therapist, examining Yerma's psychology from a distance.

This set has another layer still, beyond cage trap or exam room: it spins on it's axis, even as characters move around it, and mix themselves up in a variety of combinations. In that sense, the set feels, to me, like a giant cake mixer, spinning it's mix of cultural and experiential ingredients around, cooking these ingredients into a whole new cake.

The baking powder of the cake, catalyst of the plot, is Assad Bouab's Sofiane (avatar of Hippolytus from Seneca's play, though he isn't Janet McTeer's Phaedra's stepson, in this version, but the son of her deceased former lover).

Stone writes remarkably modern feeling characters (the stuff Archie Barnes's super-smart kid was babbling on about left me feeling positively ancient lol), but with the exception of Sofiane, who emerges from a culture of political persecution as a man who can no longer bear to be anything but open and honest, the other characters embody a quintessential civilised reserve. It is the repeated breaking of that sense of reserve that serves up the comedy.

Funnily enough, the play this most reminds me of is "God of Carnage," in which McTeer herself played one of four characters, whose reserved and thick veneer of civilised behaviour was smashed apart into bickering and savagery by an incident at school.

Here, there is no incident, but a person, in the form of Sofiane, who triggers the comedy and tragedy.

McTeer, as ever, is an absolute force of nature, but this is such a strong cast, with John McMillan's Eric exceptionally funny, as his character is the most recalcitrantly and pathetically civilised, even under enormous pressure, and Mackenzie Davis's Isolde, Eric's wife and Phaedra's daughter, more subtly funny, in the way she is so unwittingly and believably exactly like the mother she hates. And Paul Chahidi, always reliable, is magnificent here, as a man of languages, who bridges cultures, and yet still can't hold things together. When he begins to crack, like an intellectual Basil Fawlty, I belly laughed.

Ultimately, this play moves beyond "God of Carnage" into full Greek territory, and for my money, does so successfully and excellently.

I wouldn't rate this as highly as Stone's Yerma, which was a primal scream from the soul that still upsets me to think about today, as Phaedra doesn't merit the sympathy Billie Piper's Yerma did, nor does she even merit the symapthy of Marieke Heebink's supremely soulful and tragic "Medea," but by goodness, if you're going on a grand trip into self-entitlement, Janet McTeer is the force of nature to make it exciting. 4 and a half stars from me.