WHILE Jean Racine, writing his scrupulous preface to the play in 1677, "did not as yet dare to affirm" that Phaedra (Phedre) was his best tragedy, scholarly commentators ever since have felt little hesitation in doing so, endorsing Voltaire's pronouncement of it as "the masterpiece of the human mind". Irish audiences will now have an opportunity to judge for themselves, through Derek Mahon's new version of a work which, while secure in its canonical status as a landmark in French neo classical verse drama, is very rarely staged outside France.

Until recently, Mahon shared the widely held Anglophone view of Racine's tragedies as highly formal, stiff, cultural artefacts, inextricably rooted in the stylistic conventions of the Comedic Franraise. He was also, he admits, "a little bit intimidated" by the task of translating Phaedra. Aiming to achieve a "neutral, modern style" which retains the formality of the original, he has blown the dust off the play, bringing out its sensuality and "enlivening it by the possibility of raciness and vividness".

Racine's six foot, Alexandrine metre has been translated into a five foot line the iambic pentameter, with a freer rhyme scheme. "I have used some blank verse and a wandering rhyme where it suits, for instance, at moments of great tension. It's a faithful rendering, line by line, into contemporary idiom. Everything that's in Racine is in my version," he says, "but it can take a different form."

Racine based his tragedy on two classical dramas, Euripides's Hippolytus and Seneca's Phaedra, making some significant additions to plot and character, but retaining the mythological elements of the earlier plays. With the story of Phaedra, wife of the hero, Theseus, and her consuming, unrequited passion for her stepson Hippolytus, we are presented with a segment of a much larger cycle of Greek myth, with which Racine's audiences at the court of Louis XIV would have been familiar.

Racine's knowledge of Greek enabled him to read the ancient tragedians in the original, and to translate the Poetics of Aristotle, a key text for all the 17th century French dramatists. Its elucidation of the principles of unity of action, time and place governed their plays, so that they set out to present on stage a single action in a single place, lasting no more than a single day. These precepts were more elastic then they sound, in fact, and could encompass, as in Phaedra, a series of dramatic reversals, incidents that occur offstage, and agonising deaths. As the director John Crowley says, "time is dissolved in this play - we are not concerned with literal, naturalistic truth here."

Phaedra focuses on psychological and poetic truth rather than on action, which poses a problem for modern audiences, and is in marked contrast to the tragic drama with which we are most familiar, that of Shakespeare. With Racine the drama lies in the language, and Phaedra consists of a series of finely wrought speeches, glittering with imagery and the precise anatomisation of heightened emotional states. This tension between the decorum and restraint of the form and the extremity of feeling expressed is highly effective.

"The Comedic Franaise style is to perform the play in a declamatory and still fashion," John Crowley says, "but I'm not interested in being true to performance tradition. This is a more physical production. We have to be rigorous about the presentation of the verse, yes, but the actors must also listen to the energy and excitement of the language and move when they need to. Repressed passion can be revealed in movement."

An overwhelming sense of guilt pervades the work, as Phaedra vainly struggles to master her longing for Hippolytus. Spurred on by the false report of her husband Theseus's death, Phaedia declares her feelings to her horrified stepson. Fear that Hippolytus will betray her to the returned Theseus leads her to accuse him of attempting to seduce her, so that she becomes indirectly responsible for sending him to his death. Having confessed the truth to Theseus, she commits suicide herself, succumbing almost gratefully to her self destruction. This is tragedy at its most black and unremitting.

IN THE world of the play, human actions and emotions are caused by divine intervention, and the characters' lives are overshadowed by the gods.

Phaedra herself is descended from the sun god Helios, while her father Minos presides in judgment over the underworld, and Hippolytus has the sea god Poseidon as his tutelary deity. As she struggles with her conscience, Phaedra makes it clear that her violent love for Hippolytus has been visited upon her as a punishment from Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love.

Describing the coup de joudre she experienced when she first set eyes on her stepson, she says: "I recognised the hand of Aphrodite, from whose effect there's no immunity.

"I have left the gods as they are in Racine," Mahon says. "You just have to take them as a given. They are invisible, shadowy figures - aspects of human psychology, which also have an autonomous existence. Artemis (goddess of chastity and hunting) and Aphrodite are in conflict, but these star wars are enacted in the human heart."

While claiming not to be responsible for her obsessive love, Phaedra nevertheless feels a crippling guilt, which is compounded by her false accusation of Hippolytus to Thescus; she is a victim who contributes to her own downfall - "l'innocent coupable".

The play, written just before Racine reverted to the puritanical Janscnism of his boyhood, is preoccupied with questions of free will and predestination, which the mechanism of the gods throws into sharp relief.

"Phaedra is a philosophical as well as a religious play, Mahon says, refer to Schopenhaucr's conception of the subject of tragedy as original sin, "the guilt of existence. There's a disjunction between our mind and the universe we live in."

The expiation of this existential guilt ensures that the characters are "caught in a philosophical bind as well as an ethical one. Racine's genius lies in the fact that he has seen the connection between dramatic, and theological predestination.

Mahon describes the play's set as "a huis clos, poised between the clear light of heaven and the underworld".

"There is no visual reference to the 17th century world of Racine, or to the Comedic Francaise in the production," Crowley says. "We have stripped it right back and given it a spare mythical setting, as these are characters who are associated with nature and the gods, with Sun, Earth and water."

"The play examines the human place in the universe, how humans relate to space and the gods," Mahon says. "It asks `are there any ethics, is there any reasons for anything?' Of course," he adds, "everything sounds better in French."