Sarah Kane is a difficult playwright, famed for impossible stage directions and extreme on-stage violence.  If you’re going to put her work on, you need to totally commit, and be very sure that the end result has conviction. When your script calls for on-stage rape, you have a responsibility as a director to make the show pretty bloody good, or you risk being weirdly trivial and, quite frankly, offensive. Sadly, this is a responsibility this production, a retelling of the Greek tragedy of a mother’s lust for her stepson, shirks.

Directors Joey Frances and Mark Wartenberg (who also plays Hippolytus) have made a few good decisions. They understand that the Fitzpatrick space is a strange and alienating one: the audience is removed from the action by several feet of empty floor, but this is put to good use as characters in the opening segment talk horizontally across at one another from a distance and we watch Hippolytus vegetate in his room, as if we’re voyeurs of a fishtank. The strange sense of alienation is furthered by an endless soundscape of violent TV, unnerving hums and discordant jazz. This provides hope that the show might be better than it is; but it is let down by poorly worked-out sound levels and repetition of the same tracks.

The play’s greatest problem, though, is that Kane is simply working at a different level than they are prepared to commit to. The dialogue is stark, odd and raw, but is delivered by figures like Jesse Haughton-Shaw’s Phaedra with the same intonation for every line, as if no-one had quite worked out what to do with the script. Wartenberg’s Hippolytus had an odd impression on me – starting by impressing with his foul, lazy monotone, I came to feel it was less an interesting take on the character and more simply laziness itself. The whole cast seemed to be working on this low energy-level, occasionally ramping up to points of un-signposted extreme melodrama, and it simply is not sufficient to make Kane’s intensity look anything other than silly on stage.

The shock of what occurs, with a remarkable amount of carefully concealed fellatio (incidentally using precisely the same sofa, body angle, stage position and venue as when Katherine Soper delivered her blow-job to Sam Curry earlier this year in Eigengrau. Weird the kind of déjà vus you start getting after watching too much theatre around here) and some horrible mutilation, is jarringly perfunctory. There's a reason the Greeks had violence occur offstage; there's probably a reason Kane brought it back on too, but nothing in this production tells me what it was.

And here’s where the rape problem comes in, and my major charge against the play: you simply can’t put things like that on stage if you aren’t going to do them properly. It is a horrible experience for any audience to have to watch simulated rape, let alone in a play they haven’t been engaged in. There may well have been coherent philosophy in the script, it might well have been justified artistically, but I wasn’t made to feel it, (Phaedra’s death barely registered for anyone) and so the only reaction I could give to the graphic ending was “Oh, for goodness’ sake”. An underwhelming production I can forgive, but an audience should never be made to feel nasty, too.  

Of course, there are plenty of poorly thought out, clumsily put-together shows in student drama, but it is worth sounding an extra note of caution when one genuinely doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of the task it has to fulfil.

Phaedra’s Love runs at the Fitzpatrick Hall, Queens’ College, until Saturday, 11pm