Phèdre
National Theatre
In theatres for a limited time from July 17th

The first live broadcast of a production by Britain’s National Theatre to over 100 cinemas across the UK, Europe and the USA, took place last month with Helen Mirren in the tital role of the French classical tragedy Phèdre.

The play centres on Phedre who is consumed by an uncontrollable passion for her young stepson. She believes her husband Theseus is dead, so she confesses her darkest desires and enters the world of nightmare. When Theseus returns, alive and well, Phedre, fearing exposure, accuses her stepson of rape. The result is chaos and carnage.

It was something of an experiment artistically and financially with audiences being charged £10 a ticket to try to regain some of the estimated £50,000 that it cost to broadcast the play.

The broadcast live by satellite was seen on 68 screens in Britain, as well as 20 more in Europe, and with a five-hour time delay, to 33 cinemas in America. An audience of around 20,000 saw the play on that first day and now audiences in New Zealand and Australia are seeing it via digital e-cinema encoded high definition file..

The reaction by the critics has been almost euphoric but then this is French drama rather than Shakespeare.

Michael Billington writing in the Guardian said that “The strength of Hytner's production is Phèdre herself, in Helen Mirren's forceful performance…Mirren gives us a real woman poleaxed by passion.” And Benedict Nightingale in The Times write that “Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress revival is almost unerringly fine, Ted Hughes’ translation simple yet bold and Bob Crowley’s set apt … Stanley Townsend’s performance (as Theseus) exuded such strength, authority, outrage and danger.”

The play is incredibly muscular and dense and located within an oppressive Mediterranean set of marble and bright blue sky.

It’s a play where the gods and humans interest in power plays but the emotions and dialogues are rooted in human angst, anger and love.

Helen Mirren’s performance is brilliant as she portrays a woman who has to suffer the passion of forbidden love, rejection by the one she desires and the acknowledgment of her own corruption.

One of the really interesting things about seeing a piece of seventeenth century French drama is that even fifty years after Shakespeare was writing they still had a the very different approach to theatre. The French held to the Grecian notion of the classical unities of action, place and time

The unity of action meant that a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots. The unity of place meant that a play needed to take place in one setting while the unity of time coffined the play to about the same time of the actual events.

No real dramatic action occurs on stage and any such action is described by the actors rather than seen.

This results in a very focused drama where language becomes a means of description of events as well as of emotions, requiring acting skills of the highest order and that what we get in this production.

The use of multiple cameras means we see the appropriate view at each stage, wide angle for full stage views when there are several characters and close up shots for intimate conversations.

From The Critics

Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) - “The strength of Hytner's production is Phèdre herself, in Helen Mirren's forceful performance…Mirren gives us a real woman poleaxed by passion… Dominic Cooper's Hippolytus combines vocal incisiveness with a visible horror of his stepmother's wayward desire. Stanley Townsend as Theseus, the false news of whose death precipitates the tragedy, is a figure of burly power who might plausibly have slayed the Minotaur and bedded legions of women. And John Shrapnel is riveting as Theramene, Hippolytus' counsellor, and invests his long speech describing his protege's death with an incendiary rage. At times the quest for psychological realism is pushed a little too far: Margaret Tyzack is a shade too ironic as Phèdre's nurse. I applaud Hytner treating the play as a compelling drama rather than an animated poetry recital, and it is wholly in keeping that at the end … this production reminds us it is also in the dramatic action.”

Benedict Nightingale in The Times (four stars) - “Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress revival is almost unerringly fine, Ted Hughes’ translation simple yet bold and Bob Crowley’s set apt … Stanley Townsend’s performance (is) a big, brutal warlord with a face like a fist and a voice like a medieval canon … I’ve never seen a Theseus who exuded such strength, authority, outrage and danger. As the wronged Hippolytus himself, Dominic Cooper is what his secret love, Ruth Negga’s Aricia, says he is: strong, graceful, noble, proud. There are also excellent performances from the confidants, with John Shrapnel vividly evoking the young man’s hideous death and a doughty Margaret Tyzack grimly persuading Phèdre to tell destructive lies. But from the moment Helen Mirren crept onstage in a parody burka that veiled and swathed her entirely in purple, then crept out of it, an ashen moth desperate to stay in its cocoon, it was her evening ... By the end both passion and reason have gone. A beautiful Phedre has been boiled dry.”