Bell Shakespeare’s Peter Evans takes on the classic French dysfunctional family.

From the comedy-of-errors humour of Molière’s School For Wives to Phèdre – why choose this particular tragedy?

The reason we’re doing it is because it’s one of the most famous French plays that very few people in Australia get to see. As a Shakespeare company, we’re often doing incredibly famous plays and so it’s a chance to show something from the French repertoire that, if you were French, would be like Hamlet.

Are you presenting it within a contemporary setting?

A common thread in my work over the last few years is that you see the edges of a stage; see the mechanics of the production forming in front of you. But even with a contemporary setting, this is very much a play with gods and monsters, so rather than just finding an equivalent for a modern audience, we are understanding this as a piece of theatre that can be seen through the passage of time. I enjoy the theatricality of the fact that yes, it looks and smells like our world, but look at the beliefs of these people make it seem strange to us, as a form of...