Reviews for Phaedra, by Racine

The average rating for Phaedra, by Racine based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-11-29 00:00:00 Tim Oneill Phèdre is hydrogen. Phèdre is helium. Phèdre is a star. I say this not only because she's the main character in this glorious play, and even less because she's been played by some of the greatest actresses in the world (Sarah Bernhardt, Helen Mirren, Fernanda Montenegro - yes, even Brazil adapted this famous play!), but because she's constantly in a thermonuclear fusion between reason and emotion that ultimately leads to self-destruction in such a powerful blast that affects all the other bodies that gravitate around her. In general terms (hey, I'm not a scientist!, just an enthusiast, so bear with my simplifications here), a star, during the course of its life, suffers from a combat of gigantic proportions between internal pressure - caused by the fusion of hydrogen into helium in high temperature and high pressure reactions - and gravity. Once the fusion has been through enough for millions of years and exhausted its elements, the radiation pressure becomes too much, winning the battle against gravity, and the star explodes. Phèdre, Jean Racine's protagonist, suffers from an inner turmoil while trying to control her forbidden desires through her conscience - the gravity that holds everything together within her -, wishing to transform love into hate (to be able to keep Hippolyte away). Exhausted by her constant struggle, she collapses when she can't take the heat no more through an explosion of unparalleled precedents, gushing to unimaginable distances her true feelings, like lava from a dormant volcano that's been inactive for centuries and that once active won't stop showing its true power, its true magnitude, and creating drastic consequences which, in Phèdre's case, is the awaited confession of her incestuous feelings that have been suppressed for so long towards her stepson. Leaving the stars in the sky and volcano activity, for own on safety, extinct, this is a very intense, fascinating tragedy (so much that I couldn't help but to read every line more than a couple of times, as if I was producing a stage adaptation of my own where I would play all characters and needed to memorize everything.) You will find here no filler scenes, no unnecessary characters, no gimmicks. Instead of that, Racine brought all big feelings into play: there is guilt, there is jealousy, there is self-loathing and, of course, there is love. This is not a good vs evil confrontation, which I find modern and down-to-earth as, let's agree, we all have good and bad inside of us, so Racine excels in not creating determined heroes and villains, but by writing of the conflicts between confused feelings which, in their turn, drive the actions between what has been decided, pre-established against desire in its purest form - pure as in free from all boundaries and conventions: Hippolyte loves Aricie, even though she has to remain chaste and is prohibited territory by his father; and Phèdre falls in love with her stepson, the main arch of this fascinating play. This is such a heavy psychological story that Racine had no need to resort to showing violence on stage: feelings and words were enough. An interesting parallel to be made here is how these characters were - obviously - fruits of the playwright's wishes and commands, from his dialogues to his stage directions, just like we, in our real lives, can be controlled by such feelings as love and jealousy - as if they were ruthless playwrights on their own - writing and changing our lines and actions the way they see fit, ignoring previous established thoughts and behaviors, changing everything on the go, leaving their 'actors' (us) to work without any rehearsal, waiting for the spectacle to begin to then change everything, leaving all that was planned behind. Phèdre, the woman, had to improvise many times as well for she wasn't able to go on with what her reason had imposed on her, losing control on stage. This gave me a sense of realism - although, of course, there were mythological elements involved. Still on the fact that there are no villains or heroes here, even though Phèdre's (or Oenone's) actions were to be condemned, still they are somehow understandable - even if not agreeable - once you consider the situation they're in. Racine's own words of Phèdre is that she "is neither entirely guilty nor altogether innocent. She is involved by her destiny, and by the anger of the gods, in an unlawful passion at which she is the very first to be horrified. She prefers to let herself die rather than declare it to anyone. And, when she is forced to disclose it, she speaks with such embarrassment that it is clear that her crime is a punishment of the gods rather than an urge flowing from her own will." It may seem Phèdre's ordeal would be enough material to make this play so enchanting, but no. As I mentioned before, there's another forbidden love blooming simultaneously: that of Aricie and Hippolyte. I have once more to applaud Racine for his writing as I always found a fascinating topic that love's disguise is normally hatred, instead of indifference. Hippolyte, in order to camouflage - not hide - his feelings for Aricie (and the same applies, in the beginning, to how his stepmother acted towards him), made use of hate. It seems the desire of receiving something in return, of awakening in the other any sentiment - even hate - is better than to go on unnoticed (for receiving indifference back would be too harsh), as if it would be easier to transform that sentiment into love than to generate a brand new feeling from scratch. I'm beyond happy to have read this gorgeous play. I find it delightful that in literature, just as in life, things are all interconnected. Artists, in their works, generously offer us new material, new books, new writings to pursue, as if to not abandon us - knowing that ending a book leaves us with a sense of being lost -, so they show us the way to new knowledge, to new books, to new writers, to whom we will devote ourselves until the time has come for us to jump on the next train, which will in its turn connect us to others and unexplored roads. That's how I came to know Racine and Phèdre at this time, from reading another Frenchman work, which came to me from another book and so on infinitely, both onwards and backwards, to an endless and very satisfactory journey. Rating: for a play that is, to my knowledge, psychologically accurate - written in 17th century - in depicting its characters' actions in a believable way and for Racine, masterful writer and, I must say, the true protagonist here: 5 stars that will keep on shining for a very long, long time.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-25 00:00:00 Go Dfgd When is one guilty of something, when one commits the reprehensible deed, and only one knows it, or when it is made known to others? Phèdre thinks that the latter case is a great deal worse, worse even than death: je meurs pour ne point faire un aveu si funeste je n'en mourrai plus, j'en mourrai plus coupable And so probably did Racine, because in his Phèdre, the action is activated by Phèdre's avowal of her guilt which she makes three times. These three long soliloquies are amongst the most famous parts of the play. She is guilty of loving her stepson and she acknowledges this to her "confidente" (Oenone), to her stepson (Hyppolite), and to her husband (Thésée). These three confessions trigger the drama that unfolds irremediably fast, bringing the tragic downfall of both guilty and non guilty. But the interest of this play is not in the plot, but in the themes that Racine so lyrically develops. Love coupled with jealousy as a fatal damnation. Treachery as the worst ignominy that can be suffered and inflicted. Choices that remain captive and render Destiny unavoidable. And expectedly in Racine, the power of the word as the vehicle for the human soul. Racine's tragedies are distilled drama. They are tragedies at their purest in which there is the very minimum of extraneous material. Respecting the three Aristotelian units of one place, one theme and one unit of time (one day), Racine also added the typically 17th century French concept of "bienséance" or "propriety". He approached the three units by emptying them as much as possible. The place is no place, but just an enclosing undefined lieu that traps the tragic heroes and heroines in their own disarrays. The action takes place elsewhere and the messengers just inform the enclosed heroes about them. The resulting single action we see acted is no action at all, but the soul's suffering them (in a way similarly to Baroque opera in which the recitatives tell the story and the arias sing the feelings). With so much material stripped out, then everything can happen quickly. We end up not been aware of whether it all happened in one day, or in an accelerated, condensed and immeasurable eternity. On the stage are left the abstract concepts that do not resolve. For Phèdre has remained guilty. I have reread this play as a complement to reading Marcel Proust's La recherche du temps perdu as part of the 2013: The Year of Reading Proust Group. And since it is a play I have sought to watch it acted out. I found this DVD , and therefore my review will comment on this production as well. I should add that, sadly, this is the only filmed production of a Racine play that I have been able to find. Are they commercially so unattractive? When I lived in Paris I was on a budget but was willing to stand and queue, for sometimes close to two hours, to be able to get the cheapest tickets (FF12.-) for the Comédie Française performances (Corneille, Marivaux, but mostly Molière and Racine). In one year I did not miss one single production. I am lucky that I have seen some wonderful productions of Racine at the CF then. The stage settings were bare. The accoutrements for emphasizing the Drama were almost only the costumes that the characters wore, with their flowing tunics and floating capes and veils. They were simple but made out of absolutely exquisite materials. Contrasting hues in the clothing paralleled opposite personalities while subtle gradations in color tones marked allegiances. Only tenuously would they distract from the declaimed verses. The acting was selective. Racine's characters do not move abruptly nor do they gesticulate while they converse. They do not need to touch since they reach each other with their words. Racine's heroes and heroines are walking and speaking souls. When in this DVD Phèdre first appears on the stage as a crouching and limping neurotic woman I was shocked that this could be a Racine Queen. I had been expecting a dignified dame whose august and majestic body carried the full weight of suffering in a stately manner. Phèdre is most famous for her remarkable and very long monologues, known to be so difficult to deliver well that they can make or unmake an actress. It seems that theatre critics count their career in France by the number of Phèdres they have attended. The legendary Sarah Bernhardt was unforgettably photographed in this role. But this unappealing first entrance of a broken and bent Phèdre in my DVD is, furthermore, followed by somewhat hysterical characters who shout at each other their love and longings. Their incensed and broken sentences and undue emphasis at invented syncopations ruins Racine's verses and rhyme. For Racine was a master of the Alexandrines, the twelve syllable verses with a clear caesura in its exact middle. His iambic hexameters establish a cadential rhythm which measures an even pace. True, at selected times he breaks and joins the verses with a skillful "enjambement" (the continuation of a thought in the following verse) that has an effect of an accelerated train of thought, but this enjambement ought not to interfere with a mellifluous enunciation of the lines. His verses should have the lulling effect of a hypnotic lullaby. In the DVD production, with its broken chants and histrionic acting, a worthy exception is Théramène's account of Hyppolite's death. Were a film director of Steven Spielberg's kind get hold of Théramène's speech, it would be inflated it into a fantastic rendering of monsters, seas opening into abysms, and a hair-raising run of frenzied and desperate horses with a fatal consequence. Instead, true to Racine, a sad man, barely moving, declaims this succession of horrors, without blinking, depicting with only words the dreadful scene that gradually sinks the listening father into an unavoidable sorrow. What a wonderful speech. It is not surprising that Racine's selected use of words and exquisite ability with the Alexandrines would fascinate someone as careful and sensitive to the power of language as Marcel Proust. We have Proust's explicit admiration for the way Racine could twist the very formal structure of his verses and with a broken syntax add ambiguity and richness to his meaning. These examples he gave are from Andromaque: Pourquoi l'assassiner, Qu'a-t-il fait? A quel titre ? Qui te l'a dit ? But it was the poignant portrayal of guilty love in Phèdre that obsessed Proust. And it is this play, which he knew in its entirety by heart, that he has associated to his fictional actress La Berma and which figures in La recherche repeatedly. -------------------------- After this wonderful reading I will proceed with the rereading of more plays by Racine and with the listening of Rameau's Opera, Hippolyte et Aricie.