Why is Jean Racine’s play so rarely seen? Written in 1667 when he was 27, it is fast-moving, intensely dramatic and explores the obsessive nature of love with a savage irony. It also proves highly translatable, as Edward Kemp shows in his excellent new version created for third-year acting students, which uses flexible 12-syllable rhyming couplets.
What always intrigues one about Racine is the friction between the rigour of the form and the intensity of the passion. You certainly see that here where Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, is emotionally enslaved by his Trojan captive, Andromache. The problem is that Pyrrhus himself is adored by his impatient fiancee, Hermione, and she in turn is worshipped by Orestes, who has been sent by the Greek kings to demand the death of Andromache’s son.
The upshot of all this is a querulous quadrille, in which love becomes inseparable from hate. Hermione, in Kemp’s version, turns on the ardently imploring Orestes and tells him to “stop this self-pitying patter”, while Pyrrhus, confronting Andromache with the option of becoming his queen or sacrificing her son, bluntly tells her: “You have to make a choice – to face ruin or to reign.”
Played at a hectic pace on a narrow traverse stage, Kemp’s production could profitably give us a little more time to savour Racine’s vision of love as an incurable disease. But any idea of Racine as a bloodless formalist is banished by the fine, fiercely impassioned performances of Rosie Sheehy as a floor-clawing Andromache, Stefanie Martini as a glamorously mercurial Hermione, Joe Idris-Roberts as a punitive Pyrrhus and Freddie Meredith as a masochistically suffering Orestes.
- At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, until 6 June. Box office: 020-7908 4800.
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