Phedre
A queen consumed by forbidden desire for her stepson. Racine's French alexandrines turn sexual obsession into the most formally perfect verse drama ever written. The role of Phedre is to French actresses what Hamlet is to English actors: the summit. Sarah Bernhardt played it. So did every great French actress since.
The neoclassical rules Racine follows, one day, one place, no violence shown, read to some modern reviewers as alien machinery rather than power; one dissenting reader called the form more foreign to contemporary taste than Sanskrit drama, saying its rules “make a caricature Aristotle's Poetics in their over-application.” That reviewer isn't sold on the source material either, dismissing it as “a second-tier work by Euripides” and arguing Racine's changes expose “his own fundamentally weak grasp of what Greek tragedy is.” Blaming Phèdre's passion on a curse from the gods rather than a personal choice can read as letting the character off the hook. Overwrought delivery doesn't help: one critic described a Phèdre played “in the style of Blanche DuBois about her hatred for daylight.” With no living English-language performance tradition to draw on, any given production is closer to an experiment than a known quantity.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
