Phaedra's Love

Written in 1996 by playwright Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love is the visceral “in-yer-face” portrayal of a fictional royal family, involved in a tangled and unforgiving web of incestuous love and desire, inevitably resulting in ruin and despair. I attended a production of Phaedra’s Love at the Arcola Theatre in London, and just as I had been warned to expect, it was a grueling evening of melancholy and horrific violence. At times the play was bleakly comical and intellectually challenging, albeit in a very dark and provocative way, but overall, it left me feeling frustrated and bewildered, ultimately unable to fully digest all that I had just seen.

The first scene opens with Hippolytus, a depressed, lethargic, and narcissistic member of a dysfunctional royal family. His stepmother Phaedra feels an intense and irrational infatuation for him, and on his birthday, gives into her desires and gives him a blow job, an act which received mixed responses of gasps and scattered, suppressed giggling from the audience. The apathetic young prince rejects Phaedra, and, adding further insult to injury, tells her that he’s had sex with her daughter Strophe. In the next scene, Strophe informs Hippolytus that Phaedra has hung herself, and has left a note accusing Hippolytus of rape, and that a vengeful mob is rioting in the streets, out for blood. Hippolytus surrenders to his fate, surprisingly contented at the turn of events, ultimately relieved to have found a means to an end of his superficial life of boredom and emptiness. 

In the following scene, which for me was the most shocking and controversial, as well as the most intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking, Hippolytus is visited in prison by a priest who attempts to offer Hippolytus a path to salvation through religion and repentance. Hippolytus scoffs at the priest and his empty words of consolation and attempted guidance. In a poignant critique of the church, Hippolytus accuses the priest of living the ultimate lie, reproaching him for his hypocritical practices of living in sin, while hiding behind a façade of piety and virtue, conveniently self-assured by the guarantee that, upon confession and repentance for his sins, he will be forgiven in the eyes of God. In a surprising response to this scathing critique of the church and its self-indulgent practices, the priest gives Hippolytus a blow job, further exemplifying his own hypocrisy and moral ambiguity.   

The value of the play was not in the actors’ performances, nor in the individual stories of its characters, which to me were not particularly moving or inspiring. Rather, it is the social commentary of Sarah Kane’s writing which offers a compelling insight into difficult social issues, the weight of which is never fully conveyed by the production itself. Kane’s uncompromisingly critical text, is an acerbic political satire which blatantly criticizes the royal family, as well as the church, as arbitrary and superfluous institutions, which sell their image to the public as a way of maintaining power, and which encourage and manipulate mass idealization of the monarch and the clergy, romanticizing a fairytale image itself for public consumption. Kane highlights the sheer hypocrisy of this exploitation of the masses, and shows how this manipulation of public opinion ultimately backfires when the royal family or the church finds themselves plagued by scandal and are thus subjected to immense public scrutiny, which as Phaedra’s Love demonstrates, ultimately leads to these institutions’ downfall.