The Times
by Benedict Nightingale, The Playhouse, Oxford, 16 March 2009

Racine's intense tragedy of unrequited love is poised, raw, simply staged and psychologically complex

For a moment the spirit dips. What is Cheek by Jowl about to offer us, Racine's first great tragedy or an undertakers' conference? The cast, all dressed in severe modern blacks, sit in a row on schoolroom chairs at the back of a bare stage. Then forward come Orestes and his chum Pylades in uniforms that make them look like Black and Tans. And, still pretty stiffly, they set up the dramatic situation in the original French, with surtitles helping out us duffers - and suddenly Declan Donnellan's production takes flight.

Racine can die of decorum but, without it, he isn't Racine. Yet what makes him extraordinary is the tension between his stately rhymes and the violent emotions that seize, obsess, destroy his characters. Donnellan's solution to the dramatic conundrum this poses is to let his cast enchant us with melodious French but intersperse it with moments of fierce realism. In 1667, when the play took Paris by storm, Menelaus's daughter Hermione would never have expressed her fury at the love-rat Pyrrhus's rejection by grabbing his hair with a mad screech. Here she does and, for me, it works.

We're in the kingdom of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who is facing problems both emotional and diplomatic. To the horror of the Greeks, who fear the boy will grow up to avenge Troy's defeat, he refuses to kill Astyanax, son of Hector's enslaved widow, Andromaque. Indeed, he plans to retract his promise to marry Hermione and make Andromaque (played by Camille Cayol) his queen. That's because he's gripped by a desire that subverts reason, honour, political interest, everything. "You must die or reign," is his crazed ultimatum to a woman whose only passion is for dead Hector.

Pyrrhus's mix of love and hate is fascinating, but hasn't quite the impact of what's almost a subplot. Camille Japy gives the performance of the evening as Hermione, hiding a manipulative mind and a vindictive soul behind girlish preciosity, the archaic smile you see on Greek statues, and the vamping skills of her mother, Helen. And who is besotted with her? Her cousin Orestes, who you'd think had troubles enough without her browbeating him into assassinating Pyrrhus, then damning him for trying to do so. No wonder Xavier Boiffier, who plays him, ends up getting a sneak preview of the Furies.

I caught the revival in Oxford, en route to Southampton, Cambridge, Newcastle and the Barbican, and can't recommend it enough. It's poised, it's intense. It's simply staged, it's visually arresting. It's raw, it's psychologically complex. It's Racine.