A scene from Phaedra + Minotaur by The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet at Linbury Theatre | PHOTO: Tristram Kenton
Linbury Theatre,
London
Phaedra opens with mezzo soprano Christina Rice crawling past the corpse of her brother, the Minotaur. It ends with her wrapped up in the drapes that covered him which have been transformed from shroud to white dress and back in twenty minutes through Rice’s capable hands and even more capable voice. Rice is physically understated as she acts out the horror of her impossible love for her step-son Hippolytus, yet her connection with the audience is crackling, and her voice soars through Britten’s twenty minute cantata. It’s a strong beginning to Phaedra + Minotaur, a rare collaboration between Royal Opera and Royal Ballet.
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The dance piece which follows might not chronologically come after this tale of woe (depending on your views of the chronology of Greek myths). But Kim Bradstrupp’s creation beautifully compliments Deborah Warner’s simple, devastating staging. Minotaur is perhaps ill-named, focusing less on the Minotaur than his other sister, Ariadne, but putting the focus on the male connections between the sisters offers unusual and intriguing pathways.
Like Phaedra, Ariadne, (Kristen McNally), is devastated – not by love, but by loss, which Bradstrupp evokes across a series of titled vignettes, each with their own tragedy. The Seduction between Ariadne and Theseus tangles less with love or lust than with survival as Theseus (Jonathan Goddard) pulls Ariadne away from the corpse of her brother, before himself pulling away from Ariadne in a harrowing, lethargic duet that follows. The staging for Minotaur is only slightly less spare than that of Phaedra. The occasional prop lends this psychodrama a contemporary touch, which feels unnecessary but the red splash across the backdrop highlights something I’ve never seen before in a dance performance: a climbing wall, which Jonathan Franzen, as Dionysus, uses to undertake some mesmerising vertical choreography.
With only a few performers, and thus doubling up between casts within each performance and across the evening, Minotaur only adds to the impressive psychological depth of Britten’s Phaedra, the last piece for voice he ever wrote. 