Concentric Circles' production of 'Phaedra' dives headfirst into a sea of forbidden passion and innocence scorned. From when we first see the stage - a hunter's library dripping in blood - it is clear that this version of Racine's retelling of the Greek myth will be torn from the bone and served rare.
     However, we do not witness any physical displays of violence, lust or grief and in this, together with the minimal, unchanging set and simple props Concentric Circles stays true to the rules of Baroque French Tragedy. Where the blood flows is through the emotions and what an ocean of emotion it is: Phaedra, wife of Theseus, is drowning in her obsessional love for her stepson, Hippolytus and we first see her ready to take her own life rather than continue in this incestuous longing. But Oenone, due to her love for Phaedra, persuades her to live. So the story unfolds of a woman battling the opposites of lust and morality, and of a virtuous son pure to the last and a father blinded to the truth by deceit.
    Sheila Gish in the title role grips the audience with a virtuosic performance. She reveals the complexity of a woman's love for a man from child-like hero worship to powerful dominance, self-indulgent love-sickness to vengeful jealousy when scorned. Unlike the original Greek, here Phaedra is an 'older woman' in love with the young Hippolytus, giving her added poignancy through the bitterness of experience. This also gives added relevance to a modern audience whose conventions accept a May to December coupling but balks at a mature woman with a younger man; indeed, balks at the thought of a mature woman with any sexual feelings at all.
It was Racine's aim to make us more sympathetic to the 'wicked' step-mother than to Hippolytus, and Gish succeeds in this by revealing the very blood coursing through Phaedra's veins. 
    Daniel Betts, who plays the object of her hearts desire, gives an intelligent and thoughtful performance, walking with nobility and receding from evil. It is true of him and the whole cast that, without the fuss of props and 'action' the story is revealed wholly through their faces and voices and each actor shows great expressiveness and truth in both. The director, Christopher Fettes, is one of the founding directors of the Drama Centre, well known for its emphasis on Stanislavskian technique, and this play is a marvellous example of real, living emotion and depth of feeling in an imaginary set of circumstances.
    George Anton's Theseus is masculine and distant, reminiscent of many fathers who never really get to know their sons. Sheila Burrell as Oenone effectively hides her own passions, but hints that she too knows what it is to feel unrequited love of the wrong kind. Aricia, the young (and also forbidden) love of Hippolytus, played by Kate Gartside, is deliberate, strong and just.
    The actors' skill is underlined by the minimal movement and the space is punctured by their voices. It trembles under the weight of feeling and each rare touch is loaded with significance.
    The characters often look up to the gods for guidance, speak of them and reproach them for putting such a predicament onto mortals of flesh and blood. So it is that Phaedra feels the heavy burden of Aphrodite filling her heart with a terrible love, a 'love as poison through the house.' This poison begins to seep ever more onto the stage: a projector above a louche bed covered in animal skins shows a lapping crimson sea, the dripping walls become brighter and finally, as Rupert Frazer's Theramenes tells of Hippolytus' unjust death, the stage is slowly bathed in a creeping scarlet, the whole space now a river of blood. The spilt blood of family, of the heart's passion, and of sin and desire, swallows virtue; and we are reminded today, as the Ancient Greeks and the Court of Louis XIV were reminded before us, that there are baser instincts in us all.
Loma-Ann Bonner