Entertainment

RACINE WITH A ‘40S TWIST

Theater Review

ABSTRACT:

“A little less respect and a more filial attitude” is what the young Emperor Nero’s mother, Agrippina, wants from him. She has murdered his stepfather, the Emperor Claudius, and shunted aside Claudius’ blood son Britannicus to get Nero the throne, and what does she get? Disobedience.

This is the situation in ancient Rome in Jean Racine’s 1669 play “Britannicus,” which will be staged twice more – Jan. 15 and 16 – at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by London’s Almeida Theatre Company. (It’s in repertory there with Racine’s “Phedre.”)

If this “Britannicus” is less impressive than the Almeida’s ‘Phedre,” that’s because the 1940s are in a way a too familiar period, because the play itself, in its stark and unsurprising shades of black and white, is simplistic, and because the translation by Robert David MacDonald is mediocre.