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PETER CRAWLEYon a recipe for lights, camera, inaction

To be honest, I was hoping for an extremely mitigated success. I probably would have settled for an abject failure. After all, if the Royal National Theatre’s recent project to beam stage performances to cinemas around the world had perfectly conveyed the experience of watching live theatre with comfier seats and better popcorn, then this small, niche artform might as well call it a day.

You can only imagine my relief when, about 10 minutes into the NT Live production of Phèdre, the play that director Nicholas Hytner chose to have simulcast across the British Commonwealth, I realised what an arch decision it was to let a camera crew loose on this dusty Ted Hughes adaptation of a fossilised Racine adaptation of a petrified Greek myth. Cinema has an insatiable need to see action. The Greeks, Racine and Hughes preferred to describe it.

When Helen Mirren drifted onstage in a conspiracy of fuchsia and lavender, her flowing dress and floating gossamer veil making her look like the world’s loveliest ink blot, it was clear that she would make no concession to the understated realism of film. Neither would the play. The next couple of hours felt like something between a vague encouragement and a mild embarrassment.

When it worked – in Mirren’s most mendacious political manoeuvres, for instance – it benefited from the unapologetic jolt of theatrical villainy. But while the end result aped old-fashioned cinema narrative slavishly – the establishing shot, the close-up, the reaction shot – Phèdre is a play that’s almost contemptuous of the upstart medium, working with big gestures, unhurried dialogue and long, overblown monologues. Unlike Gloria Swanson, it isn’t ready for its close-up.

Things that work on a stage make you restless in cinema: the articulation of everything; crucial action that takes place offstage; entering a scene by running and leaving it the same way; turning away from the audience, then glancing back meaningfully.

More. Any messenger who returns from ferocious battle, dripping in a red goo which could be the remnants of a huge plate of spaghetti al pomodoro, but is probably something much worse, who is then asked about, say, the health and emotional well-being of the king’s son, and replies over 15 minutes of booming, declamatory poetry that, actually, now that you mention it, Theseus, the kid’s not doing so well.

For theatre fans keen to win more to the cause, all of this is about as mortifying as discovering an unfocused, drunken, deeply unflattering photo of your future spouse on Facebook while nervously assuring people that it’s really not the best picture. Maybe theatre is simply unphotogenic, and maybe that’s a wonderful thing. You just have to be there.

Hytner could have chosen the contemporary thrust of Tracy Letts or Neil LaBute, but I think that, perhaps unconsciously, he chose Phèdre as an act of self-sabotage. It is theatrical and uncompromising, a play about someone utterly undone by a lusty desire for a much younger, unsuitable partner.

Come to think about it, Phèdre may have been perfect programming after all.

pcrawley@irishtimes.com