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This review is from 'Phaedra(s)' run in Paris prior to its international tour
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Probably not one for the Brexit crowd, Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s monolithic, three-and-a-half-hour French-language vehicle for the great actress Isabelle Huppert is grandiose, artsy European theatre writ very large indeed.
Where best to start with it? Probably the middle: that’s the most fathomable bit, being a fairly straightforward take on Sarah Kane’s filth-caked 1996 Greek tragedy remake ‘Phaedra’s Love’.
Portentous and intense, Warlikowski’s production steamrollers the dirty British humour of Kane’s play: trust the Polish to take the key scene of a man (Grégoire Léauté‘s Hippolytus) wanking into a sock too seriously. Nonetheless, the earnestness ultimately pays off in an impressive retelling of Kane’s story that comes charged with end-of-days eroticism. Blonde wigged and full of fierce, rumpled sexuality, Huppert is magnificent as a powerful, spoiled queen who bitches with her exasperated daughter Strophe (the otherworldly Polish actress Agata Buzek, also great) like a sulky teenager. Her attempted seduction of her step-son Hippolytus is rather more reciprocated here than in Kane’s text, but the tweaks work, British squalor transmuted into doomed European grandeur (abetted by Małgorzata Szczęśniak’s grandiose industrial set). The long, noisy blowjob scene is perhaps not one for your maiden aunt, but Huppert carries it off impeccably.
It’s the most lucid section of a night that would seem to present in multiple incarnations as a sort of archetype of unbound femininity. The first part sees Huppert adopt a range of raging, despairing personae to offer a bitter prologue to the Phaedra myth. The last part is a loose adaptation of the final chapters of JM Coatzee’s novella ‘Elizabeth Costello’, and features a jacketed Huppert delivers a spirited and rousing valediction of female freedom. There is also muscular dancing from Rosalba Torres Guerrero, perhaps another aspect of Phaedra.
It’s heavy-going: Huppert is wonderful, but I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that Warlikowski had essentially added the first and third sections to make his show bigger and grander, imprinting it with his auteur’s stamp. It allows Huppert to show her full, devastating range, but there’s something haughtily self-absorbed about the whole affair that feels at odds with the usually welcoming LIFT festival, which it forms the notional centrepiece of this year.