Phaedra(s)

A true star with more than a hundred films and cult roles to her name along with awards at Cannes and Venice, Isabelle Huppert comes to the Onassis Stegi to perform a sensational recital of transformations.

She becomes the goddess Aphrodite and queen Phaedra of myth, a sacred prostitute, a love-struck suicide, an uncompromising modern woman and a living icon to self-destructive passion. Because “Phaedra(s)” is a playfully magnificent (and magnificently playful) meditation on love through the ages, which takes Euripides, Senecca and three of our contemporary novelists as its multiple starting points. It is the brainchild of one of the leading directors of our time: the Polish iconoclast, Krzysztof Warlikowski.

Boxing up his eight-member cast in an architectural stage set of unparalleled beauty, Warlikowski presents us with an idiosyncratic elegy to love, fusing scenes from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema” with electric guitar riffs and incendiary performances from an exceptional cast headed by Huppert.

"Phaedra(s)" is an iconoclastic production based on an intricate mosaic of texts which draws equally on ancient Greek myth, pop culture, philosophy and contemporary politics. Extracts from two ancient tragedies—Euripides’ “Hippolytus” and Seneca’s “Phaedra”—are combined with three contemporary works: "Phaedra’s Love" by the emblematic British Nineties dramatist and suicide, Sarah Kane, the novel “Elizabeth Costello” by the South African Nobel prize-winner J.M. Coetzee, and texts by the Canadian-Lebanese author Wajdi Mouawad.

Scenes from the films

Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, USA © Shamley Productions Inc.
Frances by Graeme Clifford, 1982, USA © StudioCanal Films Ltd
Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968, Italy © Exclusive distribution for France, Sidonis production