Sex in the Head

THE THEaTRE sEx iN THE HEad

Helen Mirren takes on the last taboo in “Phèdre.” bY JOHN LaHR

“ want to be the Sarah Bernhardt of my are melodramatic, and Phèdre is a sensa- generation,” Helen Mirren confided tional early example of this self-aggran- toI her older sister before auditioning, dizing breed whose sexuality takes the successfully, for Britain’s National Youth form of scene-making. Phèdre is a gour- Theatre, at eighteen, in 1963. More than mand of grief: she stuffs herself on shame, forty years on, with scores of outstand- binges on lamentation, gobbles down ing stage and screen performances be- grievance. The exhibition of her suffering hind her, Mirren has accomplished her is both an act of abdication and an unfor- mission; in Britain, her prowess and her gettable attack. popularity are uncontested. As if to un- Even before she appears onstage, derscore the point, she has taken on the Phèdre’s reputation as a “diabolical woman” great classical role that Bernhardt played precedes her. From Hippolytus, we hear throughout her career, from age twenty- of her “futile hatred” of him; from his nine until her late sixties: Phèdre, in Jean counsellor, Théramène ( John Shrapnel), Racine’s 1677 tragedy (in a translation by we learn that Phèdre is “a dying woman, Ted Hughes, at London’s Royal National wanting only to die,” “tired of herself, Theatre). Thanks to a venture called “NT tired of the very daylight”; from the exas- Live,” “Phèdre” was the first of four Na- perated and exhausted Oenone, we know tional productions to be broadcast in art that she wishes “to shut the whole world cinemas around the world; Mirren’s per- from her sight.” Phèdre, a demigoddess formance has been shown globally on and descendant of Helios, the sun god, is more than two hundred screens so far and defined by shadow. “I want to be hidden seen by about thirty-five thousand paying in a dark wood,” she says. Nonetheless, in customers. Statistically speaking, Mirren, her first entrance, veiled in purple and not Bernhardt, is now the most famous propping her febrile body up against the Phèdre of all time. However, it’s the nu- marble palace wall, Phèdre staggers into ance, not the numbers, that makes her the scorching day and presents herself al- performance authoritative. Mirren’s dis- most as a sacrifice to the vast azure sky. section of the Athenian queen who falls “Maybe you blush to see me like this. / You in love with her stepson takes the audi- god of the sun—look at me for the last ence into the darkest recesses of the heart time,” she says. Phèdre’s pain is real; it is of an emotional terrorist, whose only hos- also, however, a form of seduction, an un- tage is herself. conscious strategy to bind the world’s at- “My own craving fills me with horror,” tention to her. When Theseus is declared says Phèdre, the wife of Theseus (Stanley dead, after many years of wanderlust Townsend), Athens’s rambunctious, long- and derring-do, Phèdre finds herself free absent king. She desires Theseus’ son, to confess her feelings to the abashed Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper), who Hippolytus. “Look at me—see a woman loves Aricia (the compelling Ruth Negga), in frenzy,” she says to him. His indifference the daughter of a former enemy, whom inspires her to even greater theatrics; Theseus has forbidden to marry. As a de- she falls to her knees, clinging to his leg. fense against her incestuous feelings, Calling herself “depraved,” a “monster,” a Phèdre throws up a perverse firewall. She “disgusting pest,” she grabs Hippolytus’ persecutes her beloved Hippolytus into sword and prods him to put an end to her exile and forces herself into a suicidal sol- savage love: itary confinement. “I turned against my- Look—my heart. Here. self—to defend myself,” she confesses to Bury your sword here. her starchy nurse and retainer, Oenone This heart is utterly corrupt. (the expert Margaret Tyzack). Hysterics It cannot wait to expiate its evil.

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TNY—2009_07_20—PAGE 78—133SC.78—133SC.—LIVE ART—R 18630—#2 page—fixed alignment at bottom of rh column I feel it lifting to meet your stroke. Strike! the finale—a trifecta of torment—only Hughes’s version, Racine’s ravishing alex- Or am I beneath your contempt? Phèdre dies in front of us: she poisons andrines are stripped down to a rough, herself offstage, but still manages to stag- muscular, vernacular directness. Hughes’s Phèdre’s obsessive, autoerotic suffer- ger out to give Theseus a white-faced but idiom has its own fierce urgency; its sinew ing runs the risk of being dramatically lucid explanation of her gesture. Racine’s is most vividly on display in the blood- one-note; Mirren, however, finds deep characters are well-polished messengers spattered Théramène’s heart-wrenching seams of emotional truth that transcend of themes, integers in an Aristotelian soliloquy—Shrapnel nails it—in which he Racine’s structural contrivances. She equation, factored out to yield a stately reports on Hippolytus’ violent death in a parses Phèdre’s brazen abasement with balance. The play is one thousand six tidal wave, which was summoned by the an excitement that manages to suggest both self-destruction and sensuality, both guilt and predatory wiles. Theseus may be, as Phèdre says, “the laughing ravisher of a thousand women”—Ari- adne and Helen of Troy are among those he has kidnapped on his rambles—but Phèdre is the one he kept. Like her char- acter, Mirren knows how to deploy car- nality to her advantage. She arrives on- stage with a clear-eyed sexual alertness. “Venus has fastened on me like a tiger,” she says, her hand falling across her ab- domen, and you believe her. Describing the “hideous injury” of love at first sight, Phèdre tells Oenone, “I could not speak. I could hardly stand. / I knew then the goddess had found me— / The latest in the lineage that she loathes.” As Mirren plays her, it’s the battle that Phèdre wages against her fate, not her sexual feelings, that makes her he- roic. “ The curse of Venus is fatal,” she says early on, adding, “I die last and the most miserable.” Her blighted family tree looms large in her mind, if not in ours. She is the sister of Ariadne, who hanged herself, and the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, who had sex with Dominic Cooper, Helen Mirren, and Stanley Townsend in Racine’s tragedy. a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur. “What a crazed, pitiful thing / She made hundred and fifty-four lines; its dramatic gods to kill the son whom the outraged of my mother!” Phèdre says of the god- reversal—the return of the presumed- Theseus believed had cuckolded him: dess of love. “It is impossible / To humil- dead Theseus—arrives at line 827, ex- The horses galloped away with their iate me any further,” she brays at Venus, actly the play’s halfway mark. weightless bundle That had fed them, and that was your after Hippolytus cold-shoulders her. The director, Nicholas Hytner, who son. But contemporary audiences don’t partnered with Mirren for a superb 2000 We followed—all of us crying openly even believe in their own gods, let alone production of Tennessee Williams’s Like forsaken children. The trail was easy—he had signed every the classical ones. Because Phèdre’s lin- “Orpheus Descending,” another tale of stone, eage has little purchase on the current doomed love, has given “Phèdre” the ad- Left us a rag of flesh on every thorn. imagination, her terror loses much of its vantage of a gorgeous Bob Crowley set, weight. Voltaire called Racine’s Phèdre one of the best for any National produc- Hytner’s sure hand slips only in the the “masterpiece of the human mind.” tion I’ve seen. Crowley fills half the stage casting of Townsend as Theseus. A The play certainly contains great psycho- with a cloudless cerulean sky, the rest with huge man with a long gray ponytail, logical insight and poetry; to a modern the monumental forms of a low-angled Townsend is a swashbuckling but jar- audience, which expects character to be marble roof, pocked marble walls, and a ring presence. He looks the part; he just revealed through action, however, its jagged, crumbling outcropping of stone. can’t play it. He gives a minor-league dramaturgy feels static. Almost all the Brightness bears down on the behemoth performance in a major-league produc- crucial events happen offstage, and are lair and its dwarfed denizens, a cunning tion. Still, the shock and awe of the play narrated but not shown. Although three correlative for a tragedy in which heat, come powerfully through; it is a tragedy ROBERT RISKO ROBERT of the five main characters are dead by and hiding from it, are central. In Ted for Phèdre and a triumph for Mirren. 

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