You have to admire the enterprise. A new classical company, Concentric Circles, kicks off with a revival of Racine's Phaedra. It is spirited, intelligent, and boasts a fine central performance by Sheila Gish.
The one doubt I have is about the John Cairncross translation which renders Racine's intricate study of destructive passion in smoothly rhetorical blank verse.
Racine in English always poses a problem. As George Steiner once noted, "the crises which reverberate through the muted air are crises of syntax": thus the revelation of Phaedra's fatal love for her stepson, Hippolytus, is registered in French by a sudden shift from "vous" to "tu." You can't easily reproduce that in English: the only answer is to render Racine in muscular, idiomatic, localised language.
Ted Hughes's Phaedra cries, in extremis, "My life is so bloated with my crimes. There's no room for another." Contrast Cairncross's "Henceforth the measure of my crimes is full": more mellifluous, but less arresting.
I labour the point because the formal translation contrasts with the imaginative freedom of Christopher Fettes's production and Agnes Treplin's design which set the play in an early 20th century milieu. The real neatly blends with the mythological; which is why you wish they had gone for the Hughes or Robert Lowell versions.
But there is always the acting and here the production chalks up some striking successes. I've never, in the beginning, seen a more death-haunted Phaedra than Gish: hollow eyed, passion racked and stiff jointed, she seems to be shuffling towards her grave.
This makes all the more shocking the revelation of her love to Hippolytus: she's like a suddenly revived corpse pinning him to a pillar and caressing him with her scarf. And, after the realisation that he loves Aricia, she is consumed by tortured self loathing.
Gish is strongly supported. Daniel Betts's hunting-booted Hippolytus shrinks from his over-eager stepmother with a fascinated horror. George Anton's Theseus suggests a war hero who has stepped into a nest of vipers. Rupert Frazer as Hippolytus's mentor also delivers the report of the boy's death with beautifully crafted gravity and Sheila Burrell shows Phaedra's aged nurse to be one of the worst erotic tacticians in dramatic history.
It all makes for a clear, purposeful start to Concentric's programme and amply disproves Kenneth Tynan's old jibe that Racine's play is simply a disappointing sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
· Until March 9. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
