Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane

Australian Theatre for Young People directed by Kate Gaul

Bjorn Stewart, Myra Lowe, Jacob Thomas - Phaedra's Love 2008

Emily Ayoub - Phaedra's Love 2008 Photographer: Heidrun Lohr

PHAEDRA'S LOVE - Keith Gallash - RealTime 85: http://www.realtimearts.net/article/85/9052

In infinitely more intimate surroundings—the Australian Theatre for Young People Studio One—director Kate Gaul, designer Alice Morgan and lighting designer Verity Hampson create a boxing gymnasium—replete with ring, lockers and plenty of bags for pummelling—for Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, her adaptation of Seneca’s Phaedra. The creative team take the boxing conceit and run with it: prince Hippolytus inhabits the ring where he will eventually be defeated, individual scenes are treated like bouts (numbers held aloft) and members of the court hang sullenly about, exercising, shadow boxing, clambering in and out of lockers, eyes on the main action in the ring. Visitors—clergy, cops—come and go, and the audience are packed in closely and steeply around the action.

While the boxing gym conceit is hardly subtle, it matches the combative drive of Kane’s writing, the organised violence of an extreme sport parallelling the structured power of the state and the capacity for both to go beyond their limits (as we increasingly experience in our own time). It also allows Gaul to give more young performers valuable experience of stage time, later coming into their own as a furious, vocal populace, while generating a sense of things overheard and turned a very blind eye to in Hippolytus’ corrupt court.

Centre-ring, Hippolytus gorges on snacks and video entertainments and masturbates into a sock. His stepmother Phaedra makes incestuous advances, a game she cannot win—the surfeited Hippolytus feels little in the way of desire, making death an attractive option. Michael Cutrupi as Hippolytus and Emily Ayoub as Phaedra both make the most of their physical (if not vocal) investment in their roles—his slow weight belying the capacity for verbal and physical attack, her stuttering, dystrophied movements suggesting deep-seated involuntary drives. Gaul drives the show fast, her performers delivering Kane’s acerbic dialogue—with its rapid, punchy alternations—briskly and without too much nuance, although Bjorn Stewart in particular, as King Theseus, manages to rise to the demands of Kane’s dark poetry in his brief appearance. Phaedra’s Love is often grossly and gorily comic (there’s plenty of blood and guts in the murder and castration of Hippolytus), but, for all its blunt pugilism, the production manages to convey the despair underlying both Hippolytus’ condition and the state he ruinously governs in his father’s absence.