DC gets 'live' preview of Helen Mirren in passionate tragedy 'Phèdre'

June 29, 3:27 PMDC Art Travel ExaminerMarsha Dubrow

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the DC Art Travel Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Washington is getting a “live” preview of Helen Mirren as the incestuous queen “Phèdre” in Britain's National Theatre production which opens here in September at the Shakespeare Theatre Company -- the only U.S. venue.

The screening of the great tragedy “Phèdre” by Jean Racine is the first “NT Live” four-play offering of the National Theatre’s HD series similar to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD series “The Met: Live in HD”. 

The screenings June 29 and July 13 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s (STC) Sidney Harman Hall (Sixth and F Streets, N.W. in DC's Gallery Place neighborhood) are the only ones within 115 miles. 

After the June 29 screening, one audience member told me, "Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, it did." Another commented, "What an amazing actress -- what an amazing woman." Another said, "I'm emotionally drained. I don't know how I can see it again in September."

As the only U.S. site for the NT’s stage production of “Phèdre”, individual tickets for the STC's 12 performances September 17-26 sold out within five hours of being offered to the public. However, some tickets are available to new and renewing STC subscribers.

And what a draw: Dame Helen Mirren -- best known in America for her starring role in PBS’ “Prime Suspect”, and for her Oscar®-winning role as QE II in “The Queen” -- playing Queen Phèdre, who falls passionately, disastrously in love with her attractive young stepson Hippolytus. Phèdre is widely regarded as one of the most powerful roles ever written for a woman.

As Hippolytus, Dominic Cooper has quite a bit of his own draw after the film “Mamma Mia”. Cooper said he had been frightened to accept the role of Hippolytus which "powers on" from the first moment and throughout the play. He made the comment (similar to his comment about fearing  his "Mamma Mia" role!) in an interview shown at the beginning of the filmed “Phèdre”.

The filmed version's interviews include Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons ("I'm glad I'm not in the stage version," he says, faux-flubbing a few words) speaking with the play’s director Nicholas Hytner. The director, who is also the National Theatre’s Artistic Director, is best known in America for his Tony® Award-winning directing of both the Broadway play “The History Boys”, and the musical “Carousel”. 

Hytner stresses, “We’re not trying to make a wanna-be movie...Our aim is to convey the excitement of live theater. I can't wait to see whether it works." One audience member called out, "Neither can we." 

Mirren is not included in these interviews. But you can hear her interview on the NT’s website, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. She too cautions, “This (HD version) is a live performance of a play -- not a film, not a tv show.”  

Mirren terms the title role “so intense.” She describes Phèdre as “literally dying of love, mostly because it’s inappropriate…incestuous in her society.”

Racine, one of France's greatest playwrights, based “Phèdre” on Euripides' "Phaedra". Racine's play was then translated from French and adapted into free verse by Ted Hughes, the renowned British Poet Laureate. Hughes is best known in the U.S. as the estranged husband of American poet Sylvia Plath when she committed suicide at the age of 30 in 1963. Hughes’ collection of poems about their tumultuous love, "Birthday Letters", was published unexpectedly months before he died of cancer in 1998. At the time of Hughes' death, his version of Racine's "Phèdre" was appearing on the London stage.