First Night: Rigg shakes and stirs with desire
First Night: Phedre, Albery Theatre London
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Your support makes all the difference.THE CARROT-COLOURED wig is a bit of a mistake - its cut the kind that has been modelled so heroically by Fenella Fielding for the past 30 years. But there's not much else that is wrong with Diana Rigg's performance as Phedre, the queen with a fatal passion for her upright stepson.
From the moment she enters Jonathan Kent's powerful production of Racine's great tragedy - veiled but still shielding her eyes from the sunlight, and cleaving to the walls like an embarrassed culprit - she delivers an unsettling study of a woman consumed with shame and illicit desire.
"My face feels to be coming apart/with all the turmoil," she declares in Ted Hughes' strong visceral translation. Rigg has always excelled at playing women who refuse to take refuge in illusions about themselves and Phedre is, of all heroines, the most remorselessly elegant about her own guiltiness. Rigg can also brilliantly convey the sense of someone who is simultaneously undergoing a strong emotion and offering a scathing, detached commentary on it.
It's an ability used to thrilling effect in the scene in which Phedre receives the hardest blow of all; the news that her stepson is not doctrinally indifferent to all women but has fallen in love with someone else.
In Luc Bondy's production of the play, seen last week at the Edinburgh Festival, Valerie Drezille reacted with a strangulated howl of anguish. Rigg graduates her response more tellingly.
At first, she mulls over the information with a little ghastly smile, like someone getting the measure of a sick joke, before launching into a frantic fever of jealousy.
The most stunning moment in the production comes when her confidant tries to comfort her by pointing out that there's no future in the stepson's love for the girl. "Yes, but there love exists. It exists," exclaimed Rigg, giving a terrible weight of wonder, dismay and raw need to the line.
Playing the object of her infatuation, Toby Stephens shows a touching and abjectly comic side to Hippolytus's inexperience with women. He's like a youth who has spent his life compensating for having an absentee big-shot hero for a father. This actor is much better than his blank pretty- boy counterpart in the Bondy production.
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