Phaedra

Summary

Phaedra, in Tibor Hrs Pandur’s stage adaptation, unravels a rich tapestry of ancient allusion and contemporary insight to re-explore the archetypal narrative of love, passion, power, and fate. Drawing from a constellation of literary masterworks – Euripides’ Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, Racine’s eponymous classical tragedy, and Marguerite Yourcenar’s modern meditation Fires – the production refracts this enduring myth through a prismatic, multidimensional lens. At the centre of the drama pulses desire: the relentless force that shapes human decisions and weaves their consequences across both individual and collective experience.

This bold and politically charged adaptation employs a vivid, poetic idiom and a fragmented dramaturgical structure, intertwining divergent interpretations. Visually evocative tableaux and impassioned monologues animate the stage, while the myth’s contemporary deconstruction opens new spaces for inquiry into power, identity, and longing. “The misogyny structurally inscribed in all these texts is explicit,” writes Tibor Hrs Pandur in his dramaturgical commentary, adding: “The class divisions and patriarchal sexual economies that shaped the originals are recognized as essential engines of the drama. The staging strategy mirrors a lived reality: contemporary individuals performing an ancient tale, enabling the characters to comment on the roles they are ‘compelled’ to enact. They are, in a sense, able to look back on their own destinies posthumously and reflect from a modern perspective.”

Jean Racine’s Phaedra (1639–1699), long hailed as the crowning achievement of French classical tragedy, tells the harrowing story of Theseus’ wife, who falls fatally in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. The play lays bare the depths of emotional guilt and punishment, the aching pull of desire, the anguish of isolation, and a world bereft of grace or compassion. It asks: what becomes of us when passion and shame are turned into instruments of ruin – not just for the protagonist, but for all ensnared in the web of human freedom and the search for ultimate meaning?

Racine’s Phaedra – mythically marked by lineage and blindly driven by forbidden longing – is a figure of profound complexity. She navigates the fraught terrain of her own humanity, caught between family loyalty and societal expectation, between what is permitted and what is forbidden. Her guilt becomes a haunting obsession, one she experiences as both exquisite pleasure and tormenting pain.

Contemporary stagings of ancient and classical texts often reveal questions as urgent now as they were at the time of their conception. Though centuries may lie between us and their creation, the fundamental themes – power, passion, guilt, and yearning – remain fiercely present. Reflecting on this modern interpretation of Phaedra’s story, director Livija Pandur notes: “Nearly 2,500 years after Euripides’ Hippolytus, nearly 2,000 since Seneca’s Phaedra, and more than 350 years after Racine’s masterpiece, when we peel back the layers of time, Phaedra remains a tragedy of the emergence of power – of a destructive, irrepressible love caught between reason and desire, between life and death. And ultimately, death becomes its only imaginable resolution. A slow, inevitable dying, beginning the moment she falls in love.”

As the director explains, “The performance text engages directly with Phaedra’s theme and its reverberation in the present. By breaking away from strict verse form, it seeks to articulate a contemporary language and understanding of the tragedy. Structurally, it draws upon Racine’s classical model – first performed in Paris in 1677 – unfolding over the course of a single day, a single night, and within a single setting, following Aristotle’s unity of time, place, and action. Stripped of mythological embellishment, the play reveals with stark clarity and unsparing precision a tragedy of ambition, unbridled and nearly demonic desire, guilt and consequence, yearning and isolation, and the absence of grace and compassion. Desire becomes an instrument of devastation – not only for Phaedra herself, but for all within her existential orbit.”

New interpretations of the figure of Phaedra open space for urgent reflection on female creativity, responsibility, guilt, and liberation – for the tension between societal expectations and the voice within. As Jerneja Ferlež, lecturer at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, writes in her essay Questions of Passion: “The creatively impassioned ‘Phaedras’ of today will not face stoning or rejection; their worlds will not collapse, and the ‘Theseuses’ of our time will not kill for their passions. On the contrary – many will be genuinely drawn to the fire of these creative ‘Phaedras’, though some may envy it. Many will co-create vibrant, passion-fuelled collectives – and, most likely, take joy in doing so.”

* The performance contains scenes of nudity