It reinforces the patriarchal lie that women, far from being overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence and abuse, routinely accuse men of rape falsely. Phaedra’s tale is enormously potent and has parallels in other cultures for example, the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife. I was intensely curious to see how Stone would deal with this storyline. ‘Phaedra’s tale is intensely potent, but it’s powerful in a destructive way.’ Janet McTeer in the title role of Phaedra by Simon Stone.
After he rejects her, she accuses him, falsely, of rape. Those plays tell of how Phaedra, queen of Athens, falls in lust with her stepson, Hippolytus. The play, by Simon Stone, who also directs, is “after” Euripides’s Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra and Racine’s Phèdre. And then there is Phaedra at the National Theatre, starring a magnificent Janet McTeer.
Okonedo’s Medea was the second brilliant performance I’d seen in a year, after Adura Onashile’s, for the National Theatre of Scotland, last summer. What on earth do we do with these strange, knotty, difficult texts from the past? Roald Dahl has nothing on Greek tragedy, and yet we seem always to be coming back for more. It crossed my mind that my friend had once been a correspondent in Afghanistan. The same year that the play premiered, the Athenian statesman Pericles gave a famous speech in which he said that women’s greatest glory was not to be spoken about. Athenian women, particularly high-born women, were expected to be silent and remain out of sight and mind of men in public, they would be veiled.
The audience at the premiere, in Athens in 431BC, mostly male, would have received the story very differently. She had found Medea a surprisingly sympathetic character … well, for most of the play, and had the script been updated? It had, but not that much: the essentials of Medea’s character were intact, including her immortal words, “It is easier to stand in battle three times in the front line … than to bear one child.” Since Jason has just openly voiced his fantasy that men might give birth to sons without the need for women at all, there’s a magnificent, if gruesome, logic to her crime. Medea’s murder of her children is the nuclear button when it comes to punishing her faithless husband, who has cast her aside like an old rag: their sons are the symbol and reality of inherited male power.
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