The Alastair Macaulay review: Phaedra/ Minotaur, 07.02.2025
Now that the Royal Opera House has been rebranded as Royal Ballet and Opera, it could use a few productions that combine the two art forms. Unfortunately, its new double bill, “Phaedra”/“Minotaur” is a half-baked failure. Its two halves are superficially linked by being about two of the women in the life of the Greek hero Theseus: Ariadne (the Cretan royal girlfriend who, with her spool of thread, helps him slay the half-bull minotaur in its labyrinth) and her younger sister Phaedra (who no sooner arrives in Athens as his wife than she is consumed by lust for his son Hippolytus).
There are so many myths about Theseus – liberating ruler of Athens and Attica – that you could run a week-long Theseus Festival and still not exhaust the narrative potential he has inspired over more than two millennia and a half. Yes, he’s the Theseus of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. And (as the recent Hampstead revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love” reminded us) the poet Horace made him an emblem of same-sex love. Of all the various Greek heroes who dare the journey to the Underworld to free the person they love, it’s only Theseus who does so doing for a loved one of tbe same sex (Pirithous). Next month at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre, Natalia Osipova dances Martha Graham’s intensely psychological revision of the Theseus/Minotaur/labyrinth myth.
This “Phaedra”/“Minotaur” double bill is staged in the same Linbury Theatre. The director Deborah Warner directs the soprano Christine Rice in Benjamin Britten’s most ardently erotic composition, his dramatic cantata “Phaedra,” originally composed for Janet Baker and orchestra. This is a one-person psychodrama, modelled after Handel’s cantatas (Britten probably had Handel’s “Lucrezia” in mind), that plays like a mad scene, moving like a confessional towards death. Here it’s given in an arrangement for piano, with some revisions to the score’s beginning and ending (extra piano chords) that I’m surprised the Britten estate has approved. Warner’s is an odd staging, with Rice/Phaedra unveiling various items as she proceeds around the stage, but it’s not seriously perverse.
After the interval, the choreographer Kim Brandstrup re-tells the “Minotaur” story in dance terms to a sound design by Eilon Morris: which extensively quotes – without any programme acknowledgment – a beautifully elegiac but wholly inapposite Schubert piano sonata. Doesn’t the Royal Ballet think Schubert is worth acknowledging? The programme tells us that Kristen McNally (Isabel Lubach at two later performances) is Ariadne, that Jonathan Goddard is Theseus, and that Tommy Franzén is both Dionysus and the Minotaur. Please don’t ask me when Franzén is the monster whom she helps to kill or when he becomes the wine-god who rescues her when Theseus dumps her. Brandstrup labels various scenes “Deus ex machina” and “Lament”, having the words projected across the stage, but the choreography makes no sense of them whatsoever.
Does it matter that the two myths are presented in chronologically reverse order? Not at Covent Garden. In “Minotaur,” Kim Brandstrup doesn’t so much re-tell as untell the myth of how Theseus killed the half-bull monster so much as untell it. Neither of the two men in his version behaves or looks like a bull or a monster. There is no thread, no labyrinth. It really doesn’t matter which male dancer is playing which Greek character: Ariadne/McNally keeps surrendering rapturously anyway.
This “Minotaur” has one haunting feature: a painted wall, designed by Antony McDonald, in which a dark night sky slashed diagonally by a scarlet flood. And the only memorable moments of the stage action are when Tommy Franzén walks across and down this sky as if stepping across a galaxy to reach this Ariadne.
Warner, directing “Phaedra,” is far more concerned than Brandstrup is in “Minotaur” with narrative lucidity. In the title role, Christine Rice makes many fine points. “Theseus,” correctly, has two syllables: Thes-euce (rather than Thes-i-us). You can hear how often Britten takes his tragic heroine’s voice, subtly, down into chest register to darken her spirit with bitterness of passion. (Warner directs her to aim too many of her facial expressions out front, as if at the rehearsal mirror.)
No such telling details are to be found in Brandstrup’s choreography, which is generalised way past the point of meaninglessness. The dancers’ feet are used dully. So this is an opera/dance double bill in which a cantata is played as live music but the dance score is taped (which opera house is this, please?), and in which the two halves are designed in wholly unalike visual styles. It’s unlikely that the cantata will win of the audience’s dance devotees but the idea that any opera fans might be converted to dance by this “Minotaur” is too horrible. Only that strange wall designed by McDonald should be saved from this misbegotten evening.
image: RBO FB site (uncredited)
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