Seneca, Euripides and Racine all offer up the story of the queen who falls in love with her stepson as a tragedy. The late Sarah Kane gives it to us as a brutal black comedy, a savage farce in which it is not trousers that are dropped, but a dying man's entrails.
Kane was only 24 when she wrote this brief play as a commission for the Gate Theatre in London, but she already understood despair acutely. Phaedra's Love is about despair - the despair of young Hippolytus, who feels absolutely nothing and understands too much, and of his stepmother, Phaedra, who feels too much and understands too little.
Kane, you suspect, knew first-hand about both, although it is Hippolytus's journey from nihilism to transcendent death that is most absorbing here. This young prince (an excellent Laurence Penry-Jones, all muscle turned to fat) spends much of the play, corpse-like, slumped upon the sofa amid a desert of junk-food containers, watching TV, masturbating and blowing his nose on his socks. There is a toe-curling moment when the desperate, unhinged Phaedra gives him a blow job, and his only reaction is a slight tilt of his head because she is obscuring his view of the TV. It is the merest sign that this young man is alive.
Only at the end, when the mob have castrated him and popped his genitals on the barbecue, does this dying man come to life and start to feel, declaring: "If only there could have been more moments like this." The Greeks offer nothing quite so mercilessly tragic, quite so mercilessly honest. From start to finish, Kane was never less than the most scrupulously honest of writers, even if at times - as here - there is something rigid and adolescent about the honesty.
It is a wildly uneven play that has its antecedents in Dynasty and Dallas as much as Seneca. With hindsight - and the death of Diana - it seems starkly satirical and strangely prescient about our own dysfunctional royal family.
To have a chance of working off the page, it requires an almost reckless bravery in the staging. Anne Tipton's production has a steely elegance, but it is too well-mannered and restrained. It shies around the grim comedy and doesn't come close to the extremes of farce and violence demanded by the climatic mob scene. If Phaedra's Love is really going to hurt us and make us flinch, it also has to make us laugh.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0117-987 7877. Then touring.
