We haven’t seen Helen Mirren give a theatrical performance since 2003, but the years before the cameras haven’t dimmed her power to fill a large stage or rivet a first-night audience. When she grabbed at her own stomach, held it as if it were hiding something menacing and painful, and breathlessly sobbed that Venus had “fastened on me like a tiger”, you knew that she was Phèdre as Racine meant Phèdre to be. There were claws inside Theseus’s alienated queen and Hippolytus’s yearning stepmother — or maybe a cancerous growth eating away her viscera.
Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress revival is almost unerringly fine, Ted Hughes’s translation simple yet bold and Bob Crowley’s set apt. A huge contorted stone, itself a symbol of Phèdre’s incestuous feelings, joins with thick pockmarked columns to hold up a cracked slab of a roof. This is Theseus’s palace and reflects the man, in Stanley Townsend’s performance a big, brutal warlord with a face like a fist and a voice like a medieval canon. Maybe he misses some of the anguish he is meant to end up feeling, knowing that his curse has destroyed the son unjustly accused of trying to slip into his bed, but 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 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.
Does she miss anything? Maybe a little lust, maybe a moment of joy when she thinks there’s a chance of love, but mostly she offers what the text demands: shame, remorse, self-contempt.
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You believe her when she cowers, chokes, gasps and declares that “my craving fills me with horror”. And the performance doesn’t lack variety. Mirren’s voice can become a shriek or a murmur, a plea or a squawk as she contemplates a “corruption” she didn’t seek yet can’t disown. “You great goddess Venus,” she says, “it is impossible to humiliate me further, your victory is complete” — and nothing is more eloquent than her disbelief.
At one point Hippolytus says “when passion boils, reason evaporates”. That’s Racine in a nutshell, but not the whole truth of Mirren’s performance. By the end both passion and reason have gone. A beautiful Phèdre has been boiled dry.
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