- The Observer,
- Sunday November 8 1998
The Almeida have acted boldly in bringing a brace of Racine plays to the West End. Under the direction of Jonathan Kent, the actors and designer who provided a paroxysmic Phedre now supply a dignified, modern-dress Britannicus at the Albery. It is an impressive occasion.
The title is beside the point. Britannicus predicts the tyrannic rise of the Emperor Nero and the fall of his powerful mother Agrippina. The play is fuelled, as is Phedre, by the intensity of the relationship between a young man and an older woman. And, as with Phedre, any production needs to find a way of suggesting the Racinian mixture of restraint and opulence, violence and formality, decorum and emotional force.
Maria Bjornson's design projects the quality of the gangster-emperor's court magnificently, with its exaggerated steep perspectives, its rich vermilion and the huge goldfish tanks behind which Nero lurks like a shark. Robert David MacDonald's new translation is smooth rather than searching; its couplets, always ready to trip up an unwary actor, prove a problem for Kevin McKidd as Britannicus, who hits the same stress in each line.
Elsewhere, it is an evening of fluent acting. As Agrippina, Diana Rigg is effortlessly hard-bitten: with her whisky, her big earrings and her clenched delivery, she suggests both a feral, tweedy, competent member of the upper-classes and the nightmare stage-mother of a precocious infant.
Toby Stephens's Nero begins as a programmatic baddy all tics and smirks and shooting cuffs but turns into a convincing psychotic, a smouldering, malleable, powerful thug who constantly slithers between being ridiculous and terrifying. Barbara Jefford, one of the best speakers of verse on the London stage, gives a commanding performance.
