Theseus is Dead

As rumours of Theseus’s death spread, the court of Troezen is taken by another storm: the king’s spouse Phaedra confesses her love for her stepson Hippolytus.

This adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre deserves credit for making the characters more real and pitiable than literary tragic archetypes. By showing their weaknesses and desires as they get trapped in an entangled net of lies and misunderstandings, the production highlights the characters’ humanity: they appear as confused human beings rather than lustful and power-hungry politicians.

Although the show needs further polishing to fulfill its potential, Theseus is Dead is an admirable attempt at recreating classical tragedy, keeping its language and re-writing its characters’ stories. However, the ambitious project is not fulfilled by the production. The choice to replicate the linguistic register of classical tragedy is noble, but in order to be easily followed by the audience, the elevated dialogues need to be owned by the actors, who, instead, seemed rather uneasy with the archaic vocabulary.

Another adaptation of the story of Phaedra and her forbidden passion was written by Sarah Kane in 1996. In Phaedra’s Love, which shifts its focus from Phaedra to her idiosyncratic, apathetic stepson, Euripides’s characters love and suffer in the modern world. The edgy, violent rendition of the Greek tragedy (opening stage direction: Hippolytus wanks in a sock; evisceration and emasculation to follow) might be confrontational and aggressive. In typical Kane’s style it’s a gritty, uncomfortable, in-yer-face play. But it’s vibrant and full of character; it stands independently from the original and pulsates with its own identity.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case with Theseus is Dead. The show struggles to become much more than an alternative version to Racine’s play, and apart for a few bright moments it just sounded like something already heard.