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.
