Phèdre

Presented by Le Théâtre de l'épée de bois

Author: Jean Racine

Directed by: Pierre Deusy

With: Marie Hasse alternating with Eléonore Lenne Le Chevalier, Joël Abadie, Fabio Goutet alternating with Émile Arnaud, Denise Aron-Schröpfer, Jeanne Chauvin, Clara Baudonnet Herreira, Franck Nalis, Pierre Deusy

"Phèdre has such a powerful and strong personality that many directors entrust the role to mature women, forgetting that Ariane's younger sister's son is so young that he is never named... Racine's Phèdre is not the age of Thésée but that of Hippolyte, and, like him, she is above all light (the meaning of the word Phèdre in Greek), modesty and purity. It is not because he is younger (or because he is her stepson) that the tragedy occurs, but because Phèdre believes Hippolyte to be 'insensible', meaning completely alien to everything that proceeds from the body and love, and then because Love is blind, and it does not unite the two who everything should bring closer. Phèdre and Hippolyte indeed burn together with contradictions they cannot control and fight together to reconcile this mixture, characteristic of great youth, of energy and fragility, of absolute and intransigence, of purity and complexity, of violence and passion. The play loses much if we forget this and we do not understand why Phèdre's ultimate word is 'purity'... This keyword is the guiding thread of our staging, especially since none of the characters in the play are mediocre or in half-tones. They are all whole and incapable of compromise. This leads them to oppose each other more or less radically, and through these very variations and oppositions, to precisely develop an original reflection on the notion of the Absolute. This is not surprising when we recall that Racine never ceased to court Louis XIV, and to punish with death his characters (Phèdre, Hippolyte or Œnone) who do not live the Absolute in the manner of this monarch, that is to say