United Kingdom Edinburgh International Festival 2023 [11] – Phaedra / Minotaur: Christine Rice (mezzo-soprano), Richard Hetherington (musical director and piano). Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 19.8.2023. (SRT)
Phaedra
Composer – Benjamin Britten
Director – Deborah Warner
Set and Costume designer – Antony McDonald
Lighting designer – Adam Silverman
Phaedra – Christine Rice
Musical director and Piano – Richard Hetherington
Minotaur
Choreographer – Kim Brandstrup
Set and Costume designer – Antony McDonald
Lighting designer – Jean Kalman
Composer, Sound Designer and Percussionist- Eilon Morris
Dancers – Tommy Franzen, Jonathan Goddard, Isabel Lubach
Produced by Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath by arrangement with the Royal Opera House.
Roughly once a year, the Edinburgh International Festival puts on a show that feels like it belongs more on the Fringe. Here, regular as clockwork, is this year’s: an exploration of the Theseus/Phaedra/Minotaur myth that tries to say some profound things but ends up saying not very much at all.
So much of it should have worked. Staging Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra makes perfect sense on paper, after all. It is a dramatic cantata and, if done sensitively, it can be a searing insight into the psychology of somebody at their wits’ end. Christine Rice did her best to invest it with penetrating immediacy but ended up mostly singing into the audience with an anguished look on her face. Richard Hetherington played the piano arrangement (Whose? We weren’t told) very capably, though there is a definite reduction in losing Britten’s colourful use of his small ensemble.
Deborah Warner’s staging was something and nothing, though, a shiny black floor with a white backdrop featuring the piano and several objects shrouded in a white sheet. Phaedra appears on stage with a blindfold and gropes her way towards each object, revealing the Minotaur, Hippolytus and a chair with her shoes on it. Nope, me neither. The Minotaur and Hippolytus get up and walk off, Phaedra wraps herself in one of the sheets, the curtain falls. Sigh…
After the interval Minotaur is a dance piece to an original (recorded ) score by Eilon Morris, but what it was about is a mystery to me. Here the set was black with a doorway towards the top and various hand-grips so that it could be used as a climbing wall. Several scenes are announced to mysterious titles, like Departure or Lament. A man and woman dance around a bed, the Minotaur’s bull-head sitting in the corner of the floor. They are repeatedly drawn to it but never reach it, and at times Kim Brandstrup’s choreography is little more than some repetitious circular writhing.
The score is a sort of Boulez-meets-medieval-Celtic mashup, and the addition of an interval was a real pity, breaking up what little dramatic energy there was. Couldn’t they have found a way of doing a quick scene change to avoid that, or did they just want the audience to think they were getting value for the cost of their EIF ticket?
Things only picked up in the final scene, Deus ex machina, when another male dancer appears and makes his way, gracefully, athletically down the climbing wall towards the woman. She and he then dance a strikingly beautiful duet, which culminates in what amounts to a love scene. But what bearing did any of this have on the story of the Minotaur? Beats me. Maybe I should have asked somebody from the Fringe.
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival runs at venues across the city until Sunday 27th August click here for details.