Time Out
by Caroline McGinn, 22 April 2009

2009 looks like a renaissance year for Jean Racine. The lofty seventeenth-century French dramatist has often gone down like a lead ballon when translated into English: speech-heavy, humourless dramas weighed down by Alexandrine couplets and the neo-classical dictum that most of the good bits (ie violence) take place offstage. But Cheek by Jowl's excellent production of 'Andromaque', along with Helen Mirren's eagerly anticipated 'Phèdre' at the National this summer, should help raise his rather aquiline profile.

'Andromaque' is a daisy chain of obsession and murder, whose characters (Pyrrhus, his Trojan booty Andromaque, his spurned fiancée Hermione and her old Greek flame Orestes) are caught in the bloody backwash of the Trojan War. Director Declan Donnelan's electric company of French actors spit and rasp out the words in their original language, making such rolling havoc out of the lines that even if you're no linguist their force and feeling pour over you. Camille Cayol is guttural and mesmerising as the stern captive Andromaque, who must decide whether to sacrifice her son to the vengeful Greeks or marry the man who butchered her family and keeps her imprisoned while he courts her. Camille Japy is all feline vanity as Hermione, unable to comprehend the fatal consequences of the revenge she demands out of pure pique.

The surtitles are the Achilles heel of Declan Donnellan's tense, sparse production: they're readable, but a lot less eloquent than the emotional storm on stage. The air of elegant repression helps make this barely staged drama hypnotic: the lovers' costumes wouldn't look out of place at a 1940s Parisian soirée, but there's nothing courteous about the unrequited passions that destroy them all in a shower of bloodstained wedding confetti.