The Observer
by Susannah Clapp, 3 May 2009

It's hard to imagine Andromaque being more fiery or more precise than it is in Cheek by Jowl's superb production. The lethal loop of these lovers - Orestes loves Hermione who loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromaque who is the widow of Hector who was killed by Pyrrhus - is staged with a stripped down intensity that mirrors the spareness of Racine's verse.

Set after the sack of Troy, written in the aftermath of the thirty years' war, it is performed in the dark austerity dress of the second world war, with just one splash of white - the heavy folds of the heroine's ill-fated wedding dress. A watchful onstage cast sits immobile and silent. Their rigidness encloses couples who move, sometimes leap, across the stage as liquidly as dancers, and who spit out their souls with a biting eloquence.

Hermione is caught against a concrete wall in a slanting cone of light. The mood shifts as the stage is drenched first in golden then in white light. The devastation of a world is conjured by a handful of blood-stained confetti and the sound of an approaching wind. Declan Donnellan's production, designed by Nick Ormerod and lit by Judith Greenwood, is in French with surtitles: it has had queues for returns in London; it's at Warwick Arts Centre from Wednesday to Saturday