Berenice – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/oct/03/berenice-review

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Racine in English? It always poses a problem, but we're getting steadily better at it. And director Josie Rourke and translator Alan Hollinghurst come up with a radical solution to this 1670 tragedy: they treat the characters as real people rather than vehicles for oratory. The intimacy of the space adds to the impression that we are eavesdropping on a human drama, rather than a costumed poetry recital.

The play itself is unusual: a story of renunciation that ends in tears rather than blood. The situation is that Titus, on becoming emperor of Rome, is obliged to banish his beloved Berenice because she is both a foreigner and a queen. The key question is whether Titus has the courage to confront his lover with the decision.

But Racine adds a further complication in that Antiochus, Titus's friend, is in love with Berenice himself. What makes the play moving is that, instead of taking the familiar escape-route of death, the characters face up to eternal separation and the hell of a loveless existence.

The great danger is that the play becomes a study in suffocating nobility. But Hollinghurst's translation, swapping Racine's rhyming alexandrine couplets for blank verse, avoids that by rendering the play in clear, simple language. He even, reversing the French word-order, allows Berenice to end her final speech of self-sacrifice on a preposition.

And it's a measure of the humanity of both this version and Rourke's production that we are allowed the occasional laugh. When Antiochus indulges in the delusion that the rejected Berenice will turn to him, his confidant's cry of "What can go wrong?" encourages an ironic chuckle.

Anne-Marie Duff, as you'd expect from her earthy stage Saint Joan or her appearance in TV's Shameless, strips Berenice of fluting grandeur. Sporting a strapless red gown, she presents us with a woman palpably in love. Her instinctive reaction to Titus is to shoot him a warm smile and to wrap him in her arms. When she realises her fate, her love turns to understandable fury as she asks why he hadn't warned her earlier: "Did you not know your laws when I declared myself for the first time?" And even the final scene of separation is prefaced by a sad, weary sigh. Instead of blistering rhetoric, Duff gives us recognisable human emotion.

Stephen Campbell Moore takes the same approach to Titus, he presents us with a man who, however weak and vacillating, knows he is ultimately trapped by the obligations of empire.

Dominic Rowan also plays Antiochus as a good man living in a world of illusion and Nigel Cooke as Titus's sidekick embodies the inflexible Roman virtues. I was, admittedly, a bit puzzled by Lucy Osborne's design, which, with its sand-filled surface and a winding staircase apparently made of chairs, suggested we were in for a mix of Beckett and Ionesco. But one soon learns to adjust to it, and the evening, as a whole, is quietly compelling. It certainly breathes what Racine called "that majestic sadness which is the whole pleasure of tragedy". But the real secret is that it reminds us that even Racine's elevated characters suffer like the rest of us.