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u póznát. Libra - Rimsko ime sazvežđa Vaga. Flegiton - Etimološki znači »onaj koji gori kao vatra«. U grčkoj mitologiji označava ime vatrene reke, kaja je tekla kroz pakao, pritoka Aherone. ■ Sillvui Purcarete

How do Britain's most original and idiosyncratic directors measure up on the international ratings chart? Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell, rough Londoners both, had new productions opening in Leeds and Coventry this week. But their efforts were eclipsed by last weekend's visit to the buzzing Brighton Festival of Silviu Purcarete's Phaedra, a stuning conflation of Euripides and Seneca performed in Romanian (with good sur-titles) by the National Theatre of Craiova. Four hundred years separate the two tellings of Phaedra's incestuous obsession with her stepson Hippolytus and its tragic conseauences. Purcarete broadly follows Seneca's Phaedra in keeping the heroine onstage for her death and deleting the great father/son debate in Euripide's Hippolytus (428 BC). The stark Senecan simplicity is set within

the Euripidean framing device of a contest between the goddesses Artemis and Aphrodite. The first stalks the action like an elegantly high-stepping foal in white bandages, while the other lurks in the shadows of the forest as a predatory, wolverine extension of Phaedra's own destructive lust. The all -women chorus are dressed as old men in hats with long crooks, seemingly derived from the world ofTadeusz Kantor and Peter Stein's Oresfeia brigade. They shuffle on, comically individualised, as they surround the flagrant, hugebreasted Phaedra of the amazing Leni Pintea/Homeag something like Maria Callas mated with Katina Paxinou - as she writhes in sexual torment. Hippolytus himself is attended by male huntsmen in loincloths. A moonlit, secretive atmosphere engulfs the action, consumes the characters and creates its own timeless, universal state of despair. The choreography is overpowering. This unmissable production returns to the Riverside Studios as part of LIFT in june, then plays in Bristol, Leeds and Manchester. Purcarete's Titus Andronicus (which I saw in Montreal two years ago) ana Decameron 646 (Dublin Festival, last year) alereted me to an extraordinary new talent. Phaedra confirms it. He will stage The Tempest at the Nottingham Playhouse in the autumn. BThe Observer, Sunday 21. may 1 995. Mischel Coveney.