Phèdre

Presented by Le Théâtre de l'épée de bois

Author: Jean Racine

Directed by: Pierre Deusy

Cast: 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 women of mature age, forgetting that the son of Ariane's younger sister is so young that he is never named… Racine's Phèdre is not of Thésée's age but of Hippolyte's, 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 tragedy arises, but because Phèdre believes Hippolyte to be "unfeeling", that is, entirely removed from everything that stems from the body and from love, and then because Love is blind and does not unite the two people whom everything should bring together. Phèdre and Hippolyte indeed burn together with contradictions they cannot master, and together they struggle to reconcile this blend, characteristic of great youth, of energy and fragility, of the absolute and intransigence, of purity and complexity, of violence and passion.

The play loses a great deal if this is forgotten, and one does not understand why Phèdre's final word is "purity"… This keyword is the guiding thread of our staging, all the more so as none of the characters in the play is mediocre or half-hearted.

They are all uncompromising and incapable of compromise. This leads them to oppose one another to a greater or lesser degree, and it is precisely through these variations and oppositions that the production develops an original reflection on the notion of the Absolute.