Simon Stone’s Phaedra is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It is one way forward for the theatre. Amazing velocity of delivery; action reaching into all corners of the stage; an arc that goes, in under three hours, from hilarity to horror – inevitably.
Stone, who six years ago galvanically reimagined Lorca’s Yerma, has made a new play of the Phaedra myth, drawing on Euripides, Seneca and Racine. He has gone to the heart of the matter – forbidden love – and cleverly reshaped circumstances: his Phaedra, a married politician played by the magnificent Janet McTeer, falls not for her stepson but for the son of a former lover (Assaad Bouab); the prohibition is more subtle, but as powerful.
You can find in this a story of post-menopausal love and an awakening for a self-consciously liberal family, yet it feels immediate, not thematic. The opening scene alone is a revelation: high-speed dialogue enclosed in a glass box. What an image for sexual explosion, for family life with a lid on it. The characters’ speech overlaps so densely I might have expected to have a panic attack at not following, but the pulse of the dialogue and clarity of diction means you understand even when missing a word.
The final scene – snow, death, solitariness, blood – is the, well, polar opposite: silent stasis. A pivotal restaurant scene is full of exquisite detail. Comedy and tragedy are fused: you can almost read the action from the behaviour of the silent spectating diners; the eventual tipping point is elusive and decisive, like watching a perfectly stacked pile of plates keel over and shatter.
There are pitch-perfect performances from Akiya Henry, John Macmillan, Mackenzie Davis and (why are there suddenly so many good juvenile actors?) Archie Barnes. Paul Chahidi, who time and again has proved a great comic actor, now has a chance to show his implacable intelligence twisting into sardonic pain. McTeer is mighty. Distraught, out of control, skittish, yet never losing her potential to command, slightly mysterious even when apparently most open. She has been away from the English stage too long.
Sylvia unrolls its story of a mighty movement with exhilaration, in uncompromising terms. Ben Stones’s set and costumes are black and white with splashes of red; in the background, Andrzej Goulding’s news-based videos flicker in monochrome. The stage is never still, swept by dance that keeps it in a state of perpetual disturbance and change. The air is full of the sound of revolt. The rhythms of Josh Cohen and DJ Walde’s score – hip-hop, funk and soul – shake bland thoughts.
Kate Prince – writer, director and choreographer – is on the brink of something stage-changing with her musical about the life of Sylvia Pankhurst, and the history of how women in the UK won the vote. Beverley Knight, with a voice like a missile, and Sharon Rose, her sound more creamy and rounded, are tremendous as Emmeline and Sylvia, the mother and daughter who warred about the direction of the suffragette movement. There is an early variation on identity politics in their row about whether the fight should be confined to women’s rights or, as Sylvia thought, naturally include all dispossessed. There is an early Keir here too: Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour party and Sylvia’s lover, caught between different pressures from his followers. Churchill’s mother is rousingly turned by Jade Hackett into a dominant Jamaican matriarch.
What holds the evening back is the script, unevenly episodic and often stilted. Dance is the essential motor of the show. Excitingly so. The suffragettes make ankle-length black skirts and white, full-sleeved blouses seem not demure cover-ups but fighting uniforms. They punch, crouch and sway. A wonderful sequence shows them practising suffrajitsu. They can seem to be the very breath of the stage: bending protectively around a dying character, leaning back at the death, their white sleeves pushing away like waves.
Four years ago, Chris Bush’s musical inspired and fuelled by the songs of Richard Hawley, took me up into Sheffield skies – and to the edge of my seat. Standing at the Sky’s Edge, seen in the city it celebrates, proved once again that specific references don’t hinder far-reaching echoes.
As a Londoner/Bathonian I did not know the history of the Park Hill flats, a modernist, egalitarian postwar dream, left to decay and now rising again; I had to have Henderson’s Relish explained to me. Still, the lives of these imagined residents – a steelworker and his wife from 1961, Liberian refugees in the 80s, a yuppie Londoner and her on-off girlfriend from more or less now – tell an instantly recognisable story of England’s industrial decline, property speculation, changing population, political dereliction.
Robert Hastie’s Sheffield production finds a natural home in the brutalist aspirations of the National Theatre. The design (again by Ben Stones) of the walkway-linked flats spans the width and height of the huge Olivier, personalised by neon graffiti, and at the end glowing with amber panels.
Some weaknesses are exposed. Hawley’s marvellous songs are more planted than propelling. Lynne Page’s choreography is, well, pedestrian, with characters walking along with outstretched arms as if they were playing aeroplanes. Yet soaring voices – particularly Maimuna Memon’s and Alex Young’s – still stir. As does the project of a show that combines political hope and excoriation with the patient rendering of individual lives. It is a good week when the National earns its name.
Star ratings (out of five)
Phaedra ★★★★★
Sylvia ★★★
Standing at the Sky’s Edge ★★★★
