Cast

Pictures

Directed by Gloria McLuckie

The myth of Phaedra is one of the most powerful and haunting in all of classical mythology. As dramatized by the French playwright Jean Racine (1639-1699), the dying queen's obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus, and the scrupulously upright Hippolytus's love for the forbidden beauty Aricia has come to be regarded as one of the great stories of tragic infatuation, the model for dozens of works about twisted family love. Ted Hughes's "tough, unrhyming avalanche of a translation" (Paul Taylor, The Independent) replaces Racine's alexandrines with an English verse that serves eloquently to convey the protagonists' passions