A soap on the ropes

It requires a rare talent to convert Phèdre, Racine's masterpiece of 17th-century French tragedy, into a piece of theatre that sometimes sounds as if aspiring to become a Channel Five soap opera.

Thanks to that fine dramatist turned misbegotten translator Frank McGuinness, and director/designer Tom Cairns, the dirty deed has been accomplished. I loathed the experience of this Phaedra with a passion.

Clare Higgins, with scarcely a pause from taking impressive part in Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana, plays the passion-ridden Phaedra, scales down the regal, elemental aspects of the character. She sports a mass of long, distressed hair. An ankle-length coat conceals a maroon costume.

This woe-begone, monotonously quavering wife of King Theseus might be suffering the hangover blues after a heavy night out on London town rather than nursing an unrequited passion for her stepson Hippolytus in ancient Greece. Her shame at, and jealousy of, Hippolytus's love for Marcella Plunkett's mechanically droning Aricia and her rage over the duplicity of Linda Bassett's Nurse strike few of the right, high notes.

Tom Cairns's sparse set, with its statue of a man, abstract stone sculpture and flames flickering in an alcove, misleadingly makes you anticipate a conventional approach. Racine's Phèdre, based on Euripides's Hippolytus, conveys the mythic, elemental drama in eloquent, sonorous couplets.

The control and formality of Racine's verse runs in fascinating contrast to the wildness of emotions expressed. McGuinness understandably dispenses with rhymes but adopts a terse, jagged, incoherent diction.

Bathos intrudes. Metaphors are mixed, language is sometimes incoherent. The characteristic use of such words and clichés as "come a cropper", "a bit of respect", "put two and two together", "the glitterati", "lover-boy" and "boyo" sound anachronistically ridiculous, even comic in this ancient world.

Michael Feast's Theseus, conveying anguish in quiet, heartfelt tones with an estuary accent, momentarily becomes a neighbourhood villain in Harlesden 2006. "I got my own back on that bad bastard, fed his delicious flesh to his doggies," he flippantly explains.

The jarring dissonances of the production are pervasive and perverse. Ben Meyjes's Hippolytus strains to suggest he is gripped by much more than furious petulance. As Hipopolytus's tutor, Sean Campion adopts the air of a shambling, almost trampish Irish attendant. He dully delivers that awesome account of his master succumbing to death and the horses of destruction. Racine has been ravished rather than revived.

Until 3 June (0870 060 6624).

Phaedra