composed from Press ReleaseOn the evening of June 25th, the National Theatre audience for Phedre will number many thousands. In dozens of venues in Europe from Ireland to Scandinavia, Iceland to Estonia, theatre goers will share the agonies of Racine’s driven characters at precisely the same moment. A short time later, taking time zones and satellite orbits into account, these audiences will be joined by others in the United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They will all be taking part in an experiment, NT Live, which will beam the action, as it happens, from the National’s Lyttleton stage to some 270 participating cinemas.
The pilot season of NT Live launches tonight, Thursday June 25th with Nicholas Hytner’s production of Phedre, by Jean Racine, in a version by Ted Hughes. Helen Mirren plays the title role, with Dominic Cooper and Margaret Tyzack also leading the cast.
Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, who is himself directing Phedre, was delighted that things fell into place just when they did: “The technology’s there, the will’s there, the money’s there and here is a great play with a great stage actress, Helen Mirren, who happens to have a massive cinema profile. But you know, the good thing is there is nothing more purely theatrical then French classical tragedy. It obeys the classical Unities. There’s very little physical action in Phedre, but it is action-packed emotionally and psychologically. It has no scenic spectacle in it. Yet eight characters come into passionate conflict with each other and all change completely. And it offers one of the two or three greatest parts ever written for women.”
Being “theatrical” in the best sense of the word, with everything delivered verbally, Phedre makes the most of the experience of theatre on screen. The long description of a terrifying sea monster would be made visual on film. But Hytner says, “I can guarantee to you that you could spend a million dollars a second on computer-generating that monster and it would not be as scary as it is described in the play.
The state of unrelenting heightened emotion is a challenge for English actors. “Racine”, says Hytner, “goes straight for extremes, he is only interested in the five per cent of time when feeling is most intense. Generally what we do [in the British tradition] is we get at the extreme by playing something else. In other words we play the subtext or rather we play the text and let the subtext emerge”. The example he gives is Romeo and Juliet where the lovers’ passion emerges amid comic and social scenes. For Racine most of this would be irrelevant.
Racine is concerned not just with passionate feeling, but more particularly with its destructiveness. Nicholas Hytner says: “Racine had one big subject: love is a disease. In his plays whenever anyone falls in love they slide inexorably into disaster, it tears them apart, their hearts explode into a million pieces. It doesn’t end well.” In Phèdre the gods are clearly a metaphor for human emotion and yet, for Hytner, “If you act in the plays you are required to believe that the gods exist. It’s no use playing Phèdre unless you believe you are descended from the Sun.”
Ted Hughes’s visceral translation is, says Hytner, “like a pane of glass, simple in a different way from Racine.” The alexandrines (rhyming, 12-syllable couplets) of the original cannot be successfully rendered in English, but Hughes has found a style using images and sometimes “an almost Medieval English way with alliteration” to match Racine’s intense simplicity.
Helen Mirren is relishing the role’s demands. “There are no lulls. You just have to commit to it. There will be no relaxation. I don’t think I’ll be seeing the inside of my dressing room at any performance, but also [the play] is so intense that you don’t want to be too far from the stage, to get disengaged from it; you want to stay in the zone.”
Mirren observes that her character “comes from a family where the women have been very unblessed in love. Her mother fell in love and arranged to have a sexual relationship with a bull [which resulted in the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull]. Lust and sexual energy are rampant in her family. At the beginning of the play she is literally dying of love. Hippolytus is her stepson but within that world that is entirely inappropriate and considered incestuous. She tries to behave very well, but fate is inescapable.”
If Phèdre’s fate is in the hands of Venus, the goddess of Love, Mirren says that nevertheless it is “an incredibly recognisable state. When we fall in love, especially if we have the misfortune to fall in love inappropriately, we feel it is more a curse than a blessing and it’s something that you struggle with and fight. It’s a wonderful play, because although it is very heightened and in this world of gods and goddesses, it is still psychologically very recognisable.”
Ted Hughes’s translation of Racine is, she says, “magnificent - so simple, so accessible, but it has poetic force. It is expressive and visceral, but at the same time it comes out like naturalistic dialogue.”
Dominic Cooper, who played Dakin in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, plays the object of Phèdre’s overwhelming desire, Hippolytus. From the first, he is described as “proud”.
“Before I step onstage, in each scene”, says Cooper, “I remind myself of Hippolytus’s pride and try to figure out where that stems from.” He has thought about what it was like to grow up as the son of Theseus, seeing how his father, an acknowledged hero, but also a cruel philanderer, behaved. “He has wonderful memories of him, of being entranced by stories of his heroism but he does not want to be that man. He is a frustrated young man, kept where he cannot break free, allowed to hunt in the forest but he has never been able to go to war. His father, although a brute, is still a hero to him. The treatment of his mother, an Amazon, appals him. The story is that she was butchered by Theseus at his wedding to Phèdre.”
At the beginning of each performance, Cooper says he undergoes “shudders of anxiety” as he contemplates the journey ahead and resolves to take it a stage at a time. “There is rarely any time to be off the boil, which makes it terribly exciting to play.”
He thinks NT Live is unlike any previous attempt to capture theatre on screen, and he is looking forward to it. “It’s going to be a challenge and, of course, being live, we actors are never going to be able to see it.”
PHÈDRE will be followed on 1 October by Shakespeare’s ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL with Clare Higgins; on 30 January 2010 (a Saturday matinee), by NATION, based on a novel by Terry Pratchett, adapted by Mark Ravenhill; and, in early 2010, Alan Bennett’s new play THE HABIT OF ART with Michael Gambon, Alex Jennings and Frances de la Tour.
Broadcast details in the New York City metropolitan area follow:
The Director's Guild Theatre – Thursday, June 25 at 7:30 PM
Monmouth University, NJ – Thursday, June 25 at 7 PM
Brooklyn Academy of Music – Thursday, July 9 at 7 PM
Film Society of Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theater – Monday, July 6 at 4 and 8 PM
Fairfield University, CT – Saturday, July 11 at 2 PM
Shakespeare Theatre Company (DC) – Monday, June 29 and Monday, July 13 - 7:30 PM
Cinema Arts Centre (Long Island) – Friday, July 24 at 7:30 PM
For further details of venues and screenings, visit http://www.ntlive.com
