There wasn’t much that the Ancient Greek dramatists didn’t know about passion, incest, murder, family secrets… Following the Edinburgh Festival’s opening week’s stunning Korean version of Trojan Women, the second week brought us British director Deborah Warner’s double bill of passion, guilt and female desire in Phaedra and Minotaur.
Commissioned for the Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio, of which Warner is director, the double bill comprised Benjamin Britten’s cantata Phaedra (his final vocal work), and Kim Brandstrup’s elegantly economical dance account of the myth of the monstrous half-man, half-bull lurking in the labyrinth. Each piece a concise 25 minutes, this classical song and dance bill got straight to the heart of things, but in oh such different ways.
Consumed with guilt and shame, yet helpless in the throes of her forbidden passion for her stepson Hippolytus, Phaedra confessed her terrible secret. She crawled the stage, caressed the piano like a lover, smelled Hippolytus’ sheets and eventually wrapped herself in them like a shroud. Mezzo-soprano Christine Rice, Olivier Award-nominated for her original performance and every bit a match for the role’s originator, Dame Janet Baker, attacked Britten’s often swoopingly discordant text full-on, aided only by Richard Hetherington at the piano. In the end, rather than awaiting her husband Theseus’s vengeful sword, she chose her own end: ‘I’ve chosen a slower way to end my life – Medea’s poison; chills already dart along my boiling veins and squeeze my heart…’ Stunned silence followed her final notes.
Minotaur was a kind of prequel. Before marrying Phaedra, Theseus had seduced and then deserted her sister Ariadne after she helped him kill the Minotaur (her half-brother) and escape from the labyrinth. Knowing all the family background was an extra (just as well, given the Festival’s reluctance to supply a printed programme), as both pieces were stand-alone dramas, although worlds apart in character, Phaedra’s visceral directness set against Minotaur’s dreamlike encounters.
Brandstrup related Ariadne’s story – or isn’t it the Minotaur’s story? – as a series of episodes, their titles projected on the backdrop. The opening battle between Theseus and the ‘monster’ was presented more as two boys wrestling, a balletic competition between Jonathan Goddard’s Theseus and Tommy Franzen’s Minotaur, watched from above by Ariadne (Isabel Lubach). ‘Seduction’ followed, with slow, loving duets for Goddard and Lubach: gentle lifts and careful weight exchanges that had the air of what we used to call modern ballet. ‘Departure’ recalled the morning-after scene in Romeo and Juliet, with Ariadne trying in vain to keep her lover from leaving. There were echoes of Macmillan’s ballet here in the clinging and twining, and in her despairing solo (‘Lament’) she sat motionless on the bed for a while, as his Juliet famously dared to do. This is not to suggest imitation, of course: Brandstrup’s style is his own and his invention really came into its own in the next passage, ‘Deus ex Machina’. As a sorrowing Ariadne cradled a bull’s head, it was as if she had conjured up the Minotaur. Franzen entered from above, shinning nonchalantly down the backdrop of a climbing wall, hand and foot holds terrifyingly almost out of reach. And then he did it all again, upside-down: a stunning feat of acrobatics that must have stopped every heart in the audience. Their incestuous pas de deux ended with them sitting side by side, the strange saga of the half-brother presented here not as a vengeful monster but as a figure deserving of our sympathy. Instead of a blood-soaked battle, we had a story of female desire, of misplaced love and longing. What a double bill.
