The Independent on Sunday
by Kate Bassett, 26 April 2009

If you call your company Cheek by Jowl, then warmth and vitality are paramount. On this basis, some may reckon Racine's neoclassical tragedy Andromaque, performed in French, with English surtitles, an odd choice for director Declan Donnellan. Traditionally, Racine is thought coldly marmoreal for his relentlessly rhyming couplets, his rules of "bienséance" (propriety) and his geometric configurations of obdurate, unrequited lovers.

Electrifyingly, though, what Donnellan's actors (touring from Paris's Bouffes du Nord) bring out is the visceral fury of the thwarted royals in this post-Trojan War drama. The Greek victor Pyrrhus becomes infatuated with his captive, Andromaque, and his enraged fiancée, the Spartan princess Hermione, seeks vengeance.

This staging in the Barbican's newly commandeered Silk Street auditorium has its stark symmetries, too, with lines of wooden chairs in a vast dark square traversed by corridors of light. Designer Nick Ormerod's 1940s black dresses and military uniforms are elegantly severe.

At the same time, the actors are emotionally ablaze. Their exchanges are fast and feverish, more spat out than spoken . Christophe Grégoire's Pyrrhus, though sleek with brilliantine, has a vulpine ferocity as well as tenderness. Camille Cayol's youthful Andromaque dashes from corner to corner, outraged and traumatised. She also has one moment of bienséance-busting eroticism, in a lap-straddling clinch – forced to succumb to Pyrrhus to save her son from being put to death.

Nor is the boy kept off stage to be merely discussed. Instead, he is a constant presence. Clutching a toy Action Man, he's a confused adolescent preoccupying both his mother and her suitor, roughly handled as they snatch him from each other's arms.

Meanwhile, Oreste is obsessed with Camille Japy's Hermione, a posturing society beauty with a glazed smile that cracks to reveal a shrieking hysteric. She overeggs the satire slightly and the tension sags midway, but mostly the evening is brilliantly paced, like a piece of impassioned music, and Donnellan locates veins of sly humour. Grégoire's Pyrrhus even has a hint of Sarkozy: pint-sized and suave, more aggressive than diplomatic, and letting politics go hang when he wants a romance.