Czerwona suknia dla Fedry

Abstract

In the play Dla Fedry (For Phaedra) Per Olof Enquist reverses the mythical-symbolic order of the prievous renditions of the story about the Athenian queen, possessed by the disastrous passionate love for her stepson. The Swedish playwright draws a picture of the world obsessed by body and physiology, a world in which the ruthless game of power and sex is played. A visible crack appears in that closed reality, clearly losing its sense, by virtue of the main protagonist of the play. The fact that Phaedra does not belong to the world which plays the game is expressed mainly by her inclination for transgression. An outward sign of the transgressive womanhood of Phaedra, of her openness or rather her perplexity and search for sense is her red frock, with which she seems to be grown together. From the first scene in which she appears, she and her frock form a unity. The red garment encloses her, enfolds and shields, at the same time drawing her intimacy out. The red frock of Phaedra is also the stigma of death, inseparable from the body, being at the same time a sign of her screaming womanhood. Zofia Wierchowicz, a late Polish scenographer, designed 30 years earlier a dress that would ideally fit the hero depicted by Enquist. She never thought of Phaedra when designing it, the frock was meant for Hamlet’s mother. And she “inscribed” in the dress of the Danish queen everything that Per Olov Enquist meant for the ruler of Athens. The erotic glamour which she provided Gertrude with establishes the aura of love that surrounds all her body. The red frock of the queen exposes the eternal openness of woman’s body. The image of vagina placed on it, of the bloody stigma of womanhood, points out the open way of life, the inside of the world. The lives of queens dressed in red becomes complete in the act of transgressing the ultimate borders. Perhaps that is why Enquist aesthetizes the death of Phaedra. He lures the spectator with her image, as the tales of supernatural beauty of saints used to lure, saints whose bodies never decayed and always smelt pleasantly. The dead queen, being one with her frock, opens the closed world of bodies. She opens a narrow passage towards the Absent, towards sense.