Magnifique evening with Andromaque

Unrelenting intensity: Camille Cayol as Andromaque
10 April 2012

It is, perhaps, the earliest example of bad post-war planning following a dubious military victory. The ragbag Greek alliance that eventually triumphed in the Trojan War foolishly took their captives home as spoils, to various grisly ends. Racine, in this great 1667 tragedy, worries at the issue of the issue of Trojan hero Hector, and whether the boy should be allowed to live to, potentially, take revenge.

Even on this bare, cavernous stage, there’s a thrilling sense of hurtling disaster, as the dangerous domino effect of thwarted passion comes to its bloody conclusion. Hector’s widow Andromaque is faced with an impossible choice: either to save her son by marrying Pyrrhus, the man who caused such carnage in her native city, or see the boy condemned to death. Pyrrhus’s spurned fiancée Hermione is not going to go quietly, either.

If any company was going to breathe compelling dramatic life into this elegant, chilly French stylist with his impeccable rhyming Alexandrine couplets, it was those international maestros Cheek by Jowl. Director Declan Donnellan might not have his surtitles in a convenient place but he certainly knows how to inspire non‑English-speaking actors to make their mother tongues peal with truth and life for us.

The modern-ishly dressed women here may be pawns and chattels but that doesn’t stop Camille Cayol’s Andromaque attacking her lines with unrelenting intensity and pawing at her son like a desperate mother animal, or Camille Japy explaining her schemes with startling, breathy calculation. A magnifique evening.

Until 2 May
(020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk).

Andromaque
Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS

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