Phaedra, Donmar Warehouse, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

A couple of years ago, Clare Higgins bagged the Olivier Best Actress Award for her performance as Euripides's Hecuba in a new version by Frank McGuinness. She returns to the Donmar now as Phaedra, the title heroine in a McGuinness adaptation of a Racine tragedy indebted to Euripides.

This time, though, the production (directed and designed by Tom Cairns) has had a much bumpier journey. Paul Nicholls was forced to withdraw at a late stage because of a severe throat infection and, at extremely short notice, Ben Meyjes has replaced him in the key role of Hippolytus, the stepson who is the innocent object of Phaedra's incestuous passion. It's understandable that the production feels, as yet, a bit undercooked in places.

There's nothing remotely lukewarm, though, about Higgins's superb portrayal of Phaedra. She brilliantly presents a creature consumed with burning self-hatred and fired by an indignant, disbelieving anger at her own humiliation.

There's the residual tough glamour, the sense of lost glory of a woman descended from the Sun; there's the reckless animal passion of a creature whose half-brother is the minotaur; and there's the anxiety of a heroine who dreads meeting the gaze of her father, Minos, judge of the Underworld. Backgrounds do not come more conflicted, and Higgins makes it inspire pity and terror.

She's victim and victimiser; deranged sufferer of her fate and appalled, almost detached commentator upon it; she's the being who wants to crawl into a hole and die and the blackly ironic protester who stares at the sky and challenges her enemy, Venus, with the question: "Do you want more glory, golden girl?"

One of the odd things about Cairns's production is that there seems to be more emotional intensity in Phaedra's relationship with her confidante Oenone than with her stepson. In a revelatory performance, Linda Bassett underlines how the servant-sidekick can be seen as part of the play's pattern of tragically misdirected love. There's an unnerving zealotry in Bassett's protective (and snobbish) devotion to Phaedra.

But the charge between heroine and stepson is disappointingly weak. There's a potentially electric sequence of erotic taunting, where Higgins tries to seduce the disgusted boy into murdering her by offering up her body for the penetration of his sword. Nicholls would have created the chemistry for this to work. But Meyjes exudes a school-prefect-like asexuality more in keeping with Hippolytus's priggish reputation than with the young man who has thawed because of his illicit ardour for Marcella Plunkett's Aricia.

To 3 June (0870 6624)