Phaedra and Minotaur review — an inspired double bill of music and dance in Bath

Having hit the ground running with an admired production of The Tempest, Deborah Warner’s debut season as artistic director of the Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studios delivers another hit with an inspired pairing of Benjamin Britten’s “dramatic cantata” Phaedra and a retelling of the Minotaur myth by Danish dancemaker Kim Brandstrup. Unfussy but atmospheric staging, strong material and dazzling performances combine to create a hugely satisfying evening. No tour planned? Somebody do something.

Phaedra is a revival of the spare but powerful lockdown production staged by Warner for Covent Garden in 2020, powerfully sung and acted once again by Christine Rice. Written in 1975 for Janet Baker, Britten’s 20-minute work cherry-picks its lines from Robert Lowell’s verse translation of the play. Racine’s anti-heroine demands (and gets) tremendous performances (Glenda Jackson’s unforgettable reading in the 1984 Philip Prowse production regularly led to audience members being stretchered off). Rice growls, whispers, screams the libretto, her mind and body consumed by a doomed passion for her stepson, eaten up by lust and remorse. Her desire for him — “I want your sword’s spasmodic final inch” — is delivered with an almost orgasmic convulsion.

The accompaniment is played by Richard Hetherington, who is now head of music for both the Ustinov Studios and the Royal Opera. His piano reduction (in place of the original orchestration of string ensemble, percussion and harpsichord) is a fine foil for Rice’s mercurial mezzo-soprano, by turns frenzied and lyrical.

Designs (by Antony McDonald) and virtuoso lighting (by Warner’s regular collaborator Jean Kalman) create a scantily furnished but ever-changing space. The Rothko-sized white canvases flanking the black box stage act as screens for Kalman’s ingenious shadowplay, which becomes a gloss on the drama itself — huge Phaedra, tiny Hippolytus — and the strength and temperature of his lighting constantly adjust the mood of the narrative, as if echoing Britten’s tell-tale key changes.

In Minotaur, Phaedra’s sister Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus after he has killed her half brother the Minotaur, lies on her rumpled bed inconsolable until a golden glow steals over her, heralding the arrival of Dionysus (Olivier-winning Tommy Franzen).

The back wall of Ariadne’s cell is scarred with an angry splash of crimson paint and studded with climbing stones which let us know — rather like having a gun in shot — that something extraordinary is about to happen. Kim Brandstrup always tailors his writing to the gifts and idiosyncrasies of his chosen cast and soon Franzen (a keen rock climber) is scampering lizard-like across the set in blithe defiance of gravity to Eilon Morris’s commissioned soundtrack.

Franzen’s Ariadne is the responsive and expressive Martha Graham Company dancer Laurel Dalley Smith, who has danced the same character in Graham’s Errand into the Maze. Her pairwork with Theseus is an uneasy jitterbug in which the superbly surly Jonathan Goddard manhandles her in tense, piked lifts or submits coldly to her embraces, her body clinging to his like an anguished bush baby. A lucky escape. Her somnambulistic exchanges with Franzen are infused with tenderness, ending with a sustained lift, the unhappy mortal transformed into a chain of stars.

★★★★★

To August 23, theatreroyal.org.uk