As a showcase for the translucent talent of Isabelle Huppert, the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski has shackled together three variations on the myth of Phaedra, who went to bed with her stepson, in Phaedra(s). Huppert shows each stitch of pain without dissolving under its weight. She is fascinating when wraithlike and when wrathful. But there is no dynamic between the pieces and for the first hour very little action; just narration over a video screen and an almost inert stage.
In the near four-hour torpor there are a few shrewd episodes. Sarah Kane’s version is staged neatly in a transparent box, with the royal family encased and exposed. After intercourse, Phaedra is told by her stepson that he has “had worse”. A riff on erotic love by JM Coetzee gives Huppert a chance to glitter satirically. Got up as an academic author (she wears specs), she is needling and nervy, throwing looks like darts.
Finally, she breaks into verse from Racine’s Phèdre – mellow, expansive, melancholy. She made me long to see the whole play. Not to look at this graffiti scrawled all over it.
