Donmar Warehouse, London: Racine's 17th century rhyming couplets are often pronounced untranslatable. Our ears are more tuned to the five-stress pentameters of blank verse than 12-syllable alexandrines, while rhyming couplets in English suggest comedy, even pantomime. Alan Hollinghurst has avoided rhyme and chosen modern yet formal vocabulary, which fits well with Racine's neoclassicism. The word "ingr…
SOURCE: The Stage at 07:12AM on October 3, 2012