Theatre review: Andromaque, Glasgow
Andromaque - Oran Mor, Glasgow
* * * *
Frances Poet’s adaptation not only takes Racine’s mighty drama – about the widow of the Trojan hero Hector, how she becomes victim of the vengeful sexual obsession of the Greek warrior Pyrrhus, and the furious response of Pyrrhus’s abandoned fiancée, Hermione - and transforms it into a ferocious double monologue for the two women, performed as if under police interrogation. It also rips the story out of time, and gives it a powerful contemporary Irish voice, changing the names of the men to the short, brusque monikers of gang leaders and urban terrorists, and shortening Racine’s famous flowing Alexandrine lines to eight-syllable phrases full of highly stylised Irish inversions – “Hard, he punched me then, and out of the door I threw it.”
If the stakes are high, though, Graham McLaren’s simple, stark production – with terrific lighting by James Gardner, and Hermione in a breathtakingly blood-smeared wedding-dress – is more than equal to the challenge of Poet’s script. And the secret of its success likes in two magnificent performance from Rebecca Rodger as Andromaque, and Lucianne McEvoy as Hermione; the one hardened by hate but terrified for her young son, and the other young, ruthless, passionate and terrifying, as she first demands Pyrrhus’s death in vengeance, then mourns with a terrible rage, and finally, unforgettably, requires that her captors let her go, like the hard-headed princess she is.
Seen on 29.06.15. Ends today