Acting Greek Tragedy

Recording 2  - Hippolytus (with Nurse), from Euripides’ Hippolytus – in two versions, by David Johnson and then Dan Smith (with Lizzie Southall as the Nurse)

This monologue is a reaction from Hippolytus to a proposal from the Nurse that he should gratify the longing of his step-mother, Phaedra, while his father Theseus is away. Hippolytus is devoted to the goddess Artemis, whom he takes to be opposed utterly to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and so he is all the more outraged by this shameless attempt to get him to engage in adultery. Unknown to him, Phaedra is actually outside, hiding, and listening to what he says openly to the chorus, to the audience, and partly to the Nurse.
There are two versions here, given the same general structure. The doors to the scene-building, from which he has come, are at the back of the studio.

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