Rickety Racine

High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for asylum-seeking adventuresses seducing their rulers. So Titus sends Berenice packing. She’s reluctant to go and she hangs around while her ex-lover, Antiochus, hovers in the wings awaiting developments.

This is the position at the start of the play and, 90 minutes later, not much has happened although a lot of feelings have been discussed in wordy speeches. Racine writes like a corporate lawyer. His characters are good at analysing their emotions and listing their many gradations and shades of colour. But they never surrender to the implacable forces of the heart and the blood. In Racine’s day, audiences were accustomed to a lofty, cool, formalised drama in which emotion was regarded as at best trivial and at worst humiliating.