Phedre” is an everyday story of an ancient Greek royal family. A queen, thinking her husband Theseus is dead, reveals her incestuous love for her stepson, Hippolytus, who prefers the love of a young woman. But Theseus returns and Phèdre tries to protect her reputation by suggesting that Hippolytus has raped her.

The drama ends in the deaths of Hippolytus and Phèdre. This is not easy to absorb in a single instalment, especially as it was written in iambic pentameters in 1677 by a French playwright, Jean Racine, and is played in two hours without an interval. Even when performed in a version by such a fine English poet as Ted Hughes, the play sounds only slightly less forbidding.

Nonetheless, on June 25th the National Theatre’s production of “Phèdre” is very likely to draw the largest-ever audience for a single performance of a play. That evening’s show is being transmitted live by satellite to 68 screens in Britain, as well as 20 more in Europe, and it will be shown, after a five-hour time delay, in 33 cinemas in America. An audience of 20,000 or so is expected to watch it. (Theatre-goers in the southern hemisphere will see it in July when it will be shown in parts that Greek drama rarely reaches, such as Wagga Wagga in rural New South Wales.)

Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre and of “Phèdre”, cannot think of a play that has reached a larger audience. The great amphitheatre at Epidaurus, south-west of Athens, where Euripides’s original version of “Phèdre” would surely have played in the 3rd century BC, and which this production will visit on July 10th and 11th, holds a mere 12,000 or so.

... contd.