Phaedra review: a ‘gobsmackingly audacious’ spin on the Greek myth

In his “gobsmackingly audacious” spin on the Greek myth of a woman in love with her stepson, the Australian writer-director Simon Stone has turned the play into a “satire on smug London elites, while retaining its transgressive, tragic power”, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard.

In Stone’s reworking, Phaedra becomes Helen, a “complacently wealthy” married politician who falls for the Moroccan son of her former lover. Janet McTeer is “magnificent” as the “mesmerisingly Amazonian” Helen, making us “feel the joy of the character’s sexual reawakening as well as its wrongness”.

She leads a superb cast – including Call My Agent!’s Assaad Bouab and the Canadian screen star Mackenzie Davis – who give “thrilling performances as utterly awful, self-absorbed people”. At times the play “teeters on the brink of absurdity”, but it’s a “must-see” even so: a “high-spec, richly textured chamber extravaganza”.

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At times this “stunningly sharp” and “hugely entertaining” drama is closer to TV’s Succession than it is to Euripides, Seneca or Racine, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. It has a “caustically funny contemporary sensibility” that grabs you from the start.

Not me, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. McTeer gives a strong performance, but the play doesn’t work and nor does the staging. Chloe Lamford’s set, a rotating transparent box with window-like bars, is “visually arresting but keeps us at a distance, even in scenes of intimacy, and we remain voyeurs to the last, never allowed into Phaedra’s mind or heart”. The lurches between comedy and serious drama create confusion over what the piece is “trying to say or do”, and the plot turns get in the way of any psychological depth.

The “crack cast paper over the gaps somewhat”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. But the play is fatally flawed. McTeer’s character is “almost entirely unsympathetic”, and the dialogue too “gauche and bombastic to give any real nuance” to her feelings and actions. What we’re left with is not tragedy, nor comedy – just a “sloppy melodrama” that fails to convince.

Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1 (020-3989 5455). Until 8 April; nationaltheatre.org.uk