Phaedra

Project Arts Centre ***

Only the most thorough scholars of Greek tragedy or French classics will know for sure, but this may be the first adaptation of Phaedrato open with an involved discourse on cosmetic surgery for sex organs. Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch's new version for Rough Magic, intelligent, acidly funny and threaded through with music, performs something vigorously reconstructive with Racine's 17th century telling: using transplants, augmentation, nips and tucks.

The place is contemporary Ireland, here portrayed in sharp, hard surfaces and expensive iridescent shimmers by John Comiskey’s impressive design, where a psychologically dysfunctional family of rapacious capitalists are barely feeling the pinch.

The news that Theseus, the brutal patriarch, is dead inspires the same woe usually reserved for a fireworks display during Mardi Gras. His wasting second wife, Phaedra (Catherine Walker), now a merry widow with the underwear to match, slinks further towards her incestuous desires for her “irritatingly chaste” stepson, Hippolytus (Allen Leech).

Where Fannin supplies an often-scabrous text, lapping at the action with dark wit and elemental imagery (the sea is arguably her favourite character), its mocking view of a meretricious, misogynist Ireland tends to undercut several characters, losing the depth of their desires. That Walker’s Phaedra cannot remember her children’s names, for instance, is funny, but she can seem as monstrous as Stephen Brennan’s amusingly horrid Theseus (who’s not quite dead) and they miss a tragic gait.

Leech gives a fine performance as Hippolytus, in therapy with Darragh Kelly’s excellent Theramenes, but Sarah Greene’s Ismene gets closest to a necessary balance between elevated and colloquial speech. Describing Hippolytus at swim, she sees him “slicing open the water, like it is a peach and he is a knife”, adding, like an involuntary riptide, “Christ, he’s a ride.”

Otherwise it falls to Cranitch’s score to convey not just epic grandeur, but a sense of history and place. Composed for traditional Irish instrumentation and performed live by an adept five-piece, it features operatic vocals from a chorus of three gods in outré costume: Artemis, Poseidon and Aphrodite.

The music, like the gods, certainly has a powerful influence, yet both roles can seem uncertain: magisterial in the production’s later stages where libretto anticipates the dialogue, fractures thoughts and beckons upheaval, but simply complementary to the early action.

The lesson of Phaedrais the peril of acting on desire, even those that are unrealised. Lynne Parker's production is well worth seeing for the scale of its ambition and invention, though it resembles an opera in embryo, as though it too has left a deeper desire unfulfilled.

Runs until Sunday (sold out)