It’s good to start from the end. Almost five minutes of applause and the audience standing for Phaedra (crown-bearing Hippolytus) by Euripides directed by Paul Curran. The audience’s joy rewarded the stage translation of a voluptuous and violent text, which the director put his stamp on without invading it. Euripides’ tragedy has a history of rewriting (it was preceded by the veiled Hippolytus probably in 482 BC) and was performed on the occasion of the eighty-seventh Olympiad. It tells the story of Phaedra’s incestuous and mournful love for her stepson Hippolytus. A terrible story, made of passion and deception, of revenge and pity. Love and death as a sign of the tragic, of the irreconcilable conflict, the foundation, for Goethe, of tragedy. Euripides resolves the guilt of love into illness and finally into the inevitability of death. For her, hanged from a rope, and for Hippolytus, torn apart by the fury of Poseidon’s promise to his father Theseus: “by sharing my misfortune with me he will learn humility“. Superb, therefore, Hippolytus appears to the possessed Phaedra. And he doesn’t realize the only bond between her and her stepson: loneliness. Only Phaedra with her passion, only Ippolito devoted to Nature. One is the prey of Aphrodite’s revenge, the other is the victim of the revenge of the female and the goddess. For Euripides, both are guilty of being deprived of their humanity. Phaedra is deprived of love as an erotic pole, Hippolytus lacks the experience of physicality. He claims his virginity in front of Theseus until the end, which Euripides redeems from the myth by projecting him into the most exquisitely human dimension: accepting the error, confronting himself. Euripidean tragedy elevates the dialectical clash to an epic of feelings, Curran’s staging extracts from the epic the apparently marginal trait, polysemy and reticence, and builds the sense of tragedy on it. It is not just the image of the dancer clicking on his cell phone, a contemporary idol of the retraction of the word: it is above all the niche of incomprehension in which the characters close themselves. The word of Euripides is so dressed in deception, so naked is that of Curran’s work.
Robert Curran is faithful to his idea of theatre: telling stories in the theater because voices, sets, music and costumes are indispensable artistic tools for him. Gary McCann, who designed the sets and costumes for most of Curran’s works, here creates a contrast between the gray minimalism of the scenography and the chromaticism of the costumes. The scenography recalls, it is not clear how deliberately, the geometry of that for Ajax: after all, the two tragedies speak to each other on several levels.
McCann imagined a construction site in the center of which stands a sectioned head, on which digital video mapping effects (Nicolas Bovey And Leandro Summo) will project the various phases of the action and the destinies of Phaedra and Hippolytus until they become a skull which allows the actors to move around occupying the entire stage space from the bottom with the platforms to the top thanks to stairs and walkways. It also justifies the costumes of the choir: reflective suits, helmets and torches, the only fragility of the staging as the significance between the construction of the ego (the head of the construction site) and the workers is neither immediate nor intuitive, lacking the law before the theatre, i.e. visibility of the unsaid. On the other hand, the unexpected chromatic effect is compensated by the costumes of the women’s choir of Trezene (white and purple peplums) and of Ippolito’s companions (a glittering and colorful hippie community), of the characters whose costumes except the black one of the nurse who acts as against the blue of Theseus’ vaguely samurai dress, they are characterized by sumptuousness. Now for the rhinestones in Hippolytus’s male dress, now for Phaedra’s acid yellow fluorescent fabric, now for the very classic purple of Artemis’s dress and helmet. Talking costumes that culminate in Aphrodite’s splendid dress, whose erotic charge is enhanced by the mix of gold and ivory tulle and by the actress’s sensuality Ilaria Genatiempo.
The actors. Curran made use of an exceptional cast. The staging works like a perfect mechanism, a sort of perfectly reconstructed 3D puzzle and owes its emotional charge to all the actors. First of all, the two protagonists. Riccardo Livermore was a magnificent Hippolytus, capable of translating the self-satisfied naivety of the Euripides character into pure ideality.
A rebel animated by an idea of the world to which he gives his all because Ippolito is a more extreme. Livermore renders it with the freshness of a confident, clear interpretation, capable of transforming the voice of the trauma of the world, which affects the character, into the non-declamatory pathos, hurray!, of the second part. Here the clash with his father Teseo, in which the Freudian 20th century bursts in (Theseus wants to kill his son, Hippolytus kisses Teseo), gives Livermore the space to show his craft. Theseus is Alessandro Albertinreturned to Syracuse afterwards Prometheus chained of last season, with a strong performance in anger and intense in the final scene.
Phaedra is a complex character: forced by the goddess Aphrodite into incestuous passion for Hippolytus, in some way she becomes his accomplice, caught as she is between sexual desire (because this is love, otherwise it would have another name) and hesitation. “Ircocervo of freedom and constraint” to paraphrase the words of Guido Paduano. Alessandra Salamida he passes the test in rendering the balance between the upheaval of eros and the tragic nature of destiny.
It holds its own with the superb performance of Gaia Aprea, the Nurse. He has all the registers, his powerful and clear voice resonates, supporting the natural acoustics of the auditorium and playing with the prosody of the lines. Aprea has the most difficult role: the nurse is the driving force of the drama.
He protects and throws into the abyss, he loves Phaedra hisgirl” and betrays her, at times his movements and facial expression make us suspect that Aprea has made his own hermeneutics of the character, making her veer towards the subtle trap of the unconscious: is the love he wants for Phaedra the one she would like to feel? Curran, on the other hand, has peppered his work with eroticism and sensuality. He is not afraid of scandal: he has the nurse put her hands on Phaedra’s sex as if the former were the literary model of the feminine, Eve, he bares Hippolytus’s chest to make him a reticent and all the more attractive object, he puts heels on all the women and above all he creates an Aphrodite who recovers the voluptas of Lucretius. Beautiful interpretation Ilaria Genatiempo. Aphrodite as the Greeks wanted her: bold, provocative, sexy, exciting, terrible.”Whoever venerates my power, I respect, but whoever treats me with arrogance, I destroy”.
The other goddess is Artemis, who appears at the end of the work, conferring at least on the divine level the circularity of the action and to whom Giovanna Di Rauso gives the fury of his stage presence. Excellent Sergio Mancinellithe servant, and Marcello Gravina, the messenger. Finally the choir masterfully directed by Francesca Della Monica. A non-determining element in the text, the chorus emerges thanks to the individuality of the actresses: the chorus girls Simonetta Cartia, Maria Grazia Solano, Giada Lorusso, Elena Polic Greco together with Valentina Corrao, Giulia Valentini, Maddalena Serratore, Aurora Miriam Scala, Alba Sofia Vella. And he underlines with hand movements Curran’s basic idea for his Phaedra (crown-bearing Hippolytus).
Translation and dramaturgy. Those who would have liked to create a diatribe on the gender issue on Ippolito’s misogynistic monologue are disappointed. Luckily, both the director and the translator Nicola Crocetti they left the women’s issue to context and avoided feminism. The strong words of Ippolito “O Zeus, why did you bring women into the world, an evil full of deceit?…It is better for the man who married a nonentity…let there not be a woman in my house who is more intelligent than she should be” echo in the quarry with the flavor of their time and take on that universality that belongs to philology, to the hermeneutics of time. LEuripides’ tragedy is the feral and feral representation of voluptuousness, of erotic purity both in the declination of desire and in that of denial. The choice to summarize the original title Hippólytos stephanophoros (Hippolytus crowned) with the name of Phaedra does not shift attention to the thematic crux of the drama, the unconscious rebellion against a god, on the contrary it amplifies it in the precise phenomenology of the consequent causal interweaving that is punishment and “collateral victim” like the playwright Francesco Morosi Phaedra defined. Furthermore, by focusing on Phaedra the drama reveals the blind gravity of human error: Hippolytus, despising Aphrodite, ruins himself and brings with him the ruin of his stepmother. But even Phaedra is guilty of a mistake, making herself the heroine of a misunderstood τιμή: the inviolable honor thanks to the false accusation of rape against her stepson Hippolytus is grafted onto revenge for the love denied to her by the young man. A jumble of feelings desired by the goddess but then embodied in the humanity of a young woman eroded by passion, as Seneca later made her. Phaedra has gone through centuries of writing and rewriting, but here she remains uncontaminated in the Euripidean vision, that is, devoid of Socratic and Senecan dramatic moralism. Hers is a clear choice of death and self-affirmation. The letter – Crocetti in his realistic choice of her has kept the lesson of lekos as a letter and not a tablet – it is the instrument of revenge, it is the finally saying within a tragedy of the ineffable. As with Ajax, in this tragedy the madness comes from the god and the unsaid takes center stage as the driving force of the action, condemning Hippolytus himself tied to the oath to the gods not to reveal the nurse’s role in the deception. Nicola Crocetti’s translation is contemporary and is in prose. A tribute to the truth of the word for a tragedy that tells of the adultery of the word. There is no shortage of lyrical glimpses, in particular in Phaedra’s delirium and in the hints of allusiveness “How I would like to drink pure water from a fresh forehead…” and the rhythm of the verse recovered in the recitation is not lacking. The non-original music of Matthew Barres (pop and jazz sounds, some references to acid music for the choir of Ippolito’s companions, a song from Bacchae children of the flowers) and the engaging songs set to music by Ernani Maletta.
Phaedra (crown-bearing Hippolytus) by Paul Curran is a beautiful staging. She suffers here and there from references and quotations, but everything is compensated and consolidated in the metonymy between vitalism and guilt. The final image (editorial photo) is a tableau vivant from Michelangelo’s Pietà: Theseus holds his dead son in his arms. Darkness falls on the stage, the light of a moving show shines on the theater.
Photo by Maria Pia Ballarino
Daniela Sessa
Daniela Sessa on Barbadillo.it
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