Take the long tunnel leading from South Kensington tube station to the Victoria and Albert Museum and you come to a massive pair of double doors. Behind these is a tiled vestibule, which the bold, young company Antic Face have appropriated as a setting for the tragedy by Euripides. Whatever the setting, the result is certainly no museum piece.
The fascination of the play lies in seeing divine anger exacerbated by human folly. Aphrodite announces from the start that she intends to get her revenge on Hippolytos for rejecting sex in favour of hunting. As she warns, in this vividly colloquial translation by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, “to draw his bow at me … mistake”.
So she gets Phaedra to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytos, with fatal consequences all around. Although the situation is divinely engineered, matters are made worse by the tale-telling gabbiness of Phaedra’s nurse, the callow misogyny of Hippolytos and the intemperate anger of his late-returning dad, Theseus.
Euripides’s play is worlds away from the corseted passion of Racine’s later treatment of the same subject in Phèdre, yet Charlie Parham’s production is a bit too frantic for such a restricted space. It is inventively staged: four actors play the main characters as well as a chorus in animalistic half-masks, and there is much hurling about of bodies.
Emma Hall, the youngest member of a theatrical dynasty, distinguishes deftly between Phaedra, Aphrodite and Artemis, David Shields conveys the self-regarding arrogance of Hippolytos, Martin McGlade’s Theseus is all-tearing temper and Emma Amos is subtly persuasive as the Nurse, urging her mistress “to lie back and enjoy it”.
By the end of 90 minutes, you certainly feel you’ve been immersed in a tragic event, but if it were played at half the volume, the production would be twice as effective.
• Until 27 November. Details: anticface.com
