It’s tough to feel too much pity for Phaedra – bored housewife, bad stepmother and the minor goddess of false rape claims. And it is tougher still while weathering Phaedra(s), Krzysztof Warlikowski’s compilation of three versions of the myth, by Wajdi Mouawad, Sarah Kane and JM Coetzee. In each iteration, Phaedra is played by the French film star Isabelle Huppert, something of a minor goddess herself. But not even her erotic force and emotive mischief can enliven the piece, which runs three and a half hours.
Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, is a woman struck with overpowering desire for her stepson. Destroyed by his rejection, Phaedra kills herself, though not before penning a note asserting that he had raped her. Then things really go downhill, sometimes involving sea monsters.
The draw of the piece – and the reason why many of the audience members who didn’t leave at intermission gave it a standing ovation – is of course Huppert. Now in her 60s, she has lost none of her glamour or her interest in collapsing it. Topped with various wigs and shod in tottering heels, Huppert looks predictably gorgeous in the costumes, which include patrician sheath dresses and a see-through teddy. But no matter how elegantly dressed, she flings herself breathlessly into the script’s grotesqueries – bleeding, vomiting, giving a suffocating blowjob. She doesn’t spare her body or her voice and she doesn’t spare the audience.
If only all that energy were in service of something more engaging. Yes, each text deconstructs the myth in a different way, challenging aspects made canonical by Euripides or Seneca. It would be cheering to say that Mouawad’s elliptical poetry, Kane’s shrewd provocations or Coetzee’s playful intellectualism are encouraged to converse but instead the plays simply pile heavily atop each other, a rugby ruck of postmodernism.
In Mouawad’s section, perhaps the least engaging as the quick, verbose speech required constant attention to the supertitles, themes of purity and pornography are layered over the myth. In Kane’s version, the puritanical prince Hippolytus is a royal slob, amusing himself with tech gadgets, frequent masturbation, and Psycho played on a loop. In Coetzee’s portion, a novelist delivers a lecture on sexual relations between mortals and gods before returning obliquely to the Phaedra legend and excerpting Racine’s stately alexandrines. For each part, Huppert conjures up a different Phaedra, toying with the idea of love as vitalizing and degrading.
Though each piece differs tonally, Warlikowski’s tired style brings to mind the director’s theater of the late 90s and early 00s – the mostly bare stage, the clinical lighting, the woman writhing malevolently in stiletto heals and a crystal-bedecked bra and panties. Probably she was meant as a stand-in for Aphrodite, suggesting the devastating power of erotic desire while wearing what must have been a very scratchy thong. Goddesses have really come down in the world.
