Dame Helen Mirren returns to the stage as another queen

Dame Helen Mirren is in danger of getting typecast as a monarch. The actress who won an Oscar for her lead role in Stephen Frears's 2006 film The Queen is to appear next June at the National Theatre in another regal role, this time as Queen Phedre in Racine's Phedre, first performed in 1677. Phedre is a rather racier queen than Elizabeth II. She is the wife of Theseus, king of Athens, who develops a fatal and unrequited passion for Hippolyte, her stepson.

Hippolyte has yet to be cast by director Nicholas Hytner, but Margaret Tyzack, who won acclaim for her performance in The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse, will play Phedre’s nurse, Oenone. Racine based the play on Euripides’s Hippolytus.

It will be Dame Helen’s first appearance on the South Bank since 2004 when she was in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. She has a long and distinguished history with the National. However, when she performed in Trevor Nunn's Macbeth in 1974 she attacked both the National Theatre and the RSC for their lavish production expenditure, declaring it "unnecessary and destructive to the art of the theatre".

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