Born in England, I came to New York to escape mother. And being a fine, upstanding Englishman who naturally speaks in an accent that causes dazzled strangers to swoon in a dead faint at the first irresistible sound of a plummy vowel, there's absolutely no need for me to be an Anglophile. Besides, the idea of kneeling on one knee before the Brits has always been alien to me.

Should Her Majesty one day offer me a knighthood for services to theater, I'll consider making an exception. It would be most ungracious of me to do otherwise. Frankly, an earldom would seal the deal. But I've never been enthusiastic about kneeling before anyone, have you? And yet whenever anything British appears on Broadway, everyone shouts "Hurrah!" and dances the hora in the aisles.

I came to live in this exuberant, generous land to experience all things American, particularly in theater. And what have I found? The American theater worships all things British. It's been a while since you won the American War of Independence. And yet in theater, we-the royal we, the never-to-be-defeated, effortlessly superior we-still rule.

I was reminded of this by a recent, big Times article entitled "The New British Invasion." Looks like the same old British invasion to me. But its thrust was that three of America's dearest, best-known classics have been placed in the hands of British directors. The implication is that American directors aren't up to the task.

In a triple whammy of Anglophilia, the veteran Anthony Page is the director of the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? David Leveaux-who also staged the controversial revival of the hallowed Fiddler on the Roof-directs The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. And the youngest of the three, Edward Hall, is the director of the Roundabout's A Streetcar Named Desire.

If the situation were reversed-if today three Americans were directing British classics in the West End-I've little doubt there would be an uproar. After all, they've been saying "Yanks go home" since World War II. But they take pride in their theater culture. They have confidence in it. They connect to the past-to the power of language and the great classical tradition. In a sense, they've been weaned on the past.

The continuing tragedy of American theater is that it doesn't have confidence in its own culture. It doesn't reveal security in its own glorious past. If it did, there would be no need to ask British directors to stage American classics. There would be no need for Anglophilia.

Now, on the one hand, I don't believe in cultural borders. Theater is an international art form, and artistic exchanges can revitalize both cultures. On the other hand, I strongly believe that American artists should not be treated as also-rans because the British are cravenly thought of as somehow "better."

If the American theater has any future, it will come from nurturing exciting young American talent-not from imports. But is the current wave of British directors proving a success?

Anthony Page is an immensely experienced director, but he has never been an innovative one. You will not get from the dependable Mr. Page a revolutionary reading of a classic. That aside, his mixed production last season of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was poorly received. His London revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, starring Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, no less, struck me as so English in accent and manner that Mr. Albee's Connecticut could have been thoroughly middle-class Sussex.

Mr. Page's strength, however, is the fine performances he usually gets from his star actors-in this case, the wonderfully big, boozy Martha of Kathleen Turner in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But Bill Irwin's George is a miscast mouse she eats for breakfast. David Harbour's Nick is first- rate, but the insecure Honey of Mirielle Enos has been encouraged to go for broad, easy laughs from the gallery. It's a popular, and unbalanced, production of Mr. Albee's American classic.

The appeal-and danger-of David Leveaux's more modernist work is his unpredictability. He never treats a classic play as a museum piece, but re-explores and even reinvents it to bring it to fresh life. His productions of Electra and Anna Christie, as well as plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, have been outstanding. But he's stumbled badly with his interpretation of Williams' The Glass Menagerie.

The casting is partly at fault. One of my acerbic colleagues has said that if you missed Jessica Lange's Blanche DuBois a few seasons ago, you should catch her Amanda Wingfield. Ms. Lange's Amanda is an older, extremely arch version of her Blanche (which, I regret to say, wasn't too successful in the first place). Christian Slater was a late replacement as Tom, the inconsolable son who dreams of becoming a writer (Williams' young self), but he's miscast even so. Mr. Slater is the wrong age and lacks Williams' essential lyricism.

Then again, the director's blatant hint that there's a sexual connection between Tom and his trapped sister, Laura (modeled by Williams on his adored, damaged sister, Rose), is-to put it politely-a misreading. But what's essentially wrong with Mr. Leveaux's staging of the memory play isn't that he's been too experimental with it, but too literal.

He's returned to the text and taken Williams at his impressionistic word. The playwright didn't want to repeat what he called "the exhausted theater of realistic conventions," and the director has fulfilled his wish almost to the letter. He's respected him too much!

The Glass Menagerie was Williams' breakthrough play, but the young and inexperienced playwright made a novice's mistake in his stage directions. He placed the Wingfield living room nearest the audience, and behind it, the dining room with an inner curtain separating it from the action. If you follow that literally-as Mr. Leveaux does-you end up with the dining-room scenes far too distant from us, and worse, played in shadow behind a gauze curtain.

Young dramatists-even geniuses like Williams-need help from time to time. The only way to stage the play is to place the two rooms side by side. The unmoving, and even wayward, performances aside, by going after the plastic, dream-like quality of the great play, Mr. Leveaux has ended up doing everything right and everything wrong.

A Streetcar Named Desire is Edward Hall's first staging of Tennessee Williams, and I'm afraid this young and most talented director is at sea. Todd Haines, the artistic direct or of the Roundabout, has said he selected Mr. Hall after seeing his production of the Shakespeare history cycle of kingly slaughter, Rose Rage. You might as well cast an ax murderer as a delicate flower. Rose Rage has absolutely nothing in common with Williams' tragedy of bruised hearts.

Mr. Hall's notion of New Orleans bluesiness is like a wide-eyed British tourist's. His mise-en-scène is loud, obvious and crude. John C. Reilly would make a passable, soft Mitch. He's utterly miscast as the bullying, animalistic Stanley Kowalski. There's no sex appeal in him, no musicality in his strained, blustery shouting. There's no "animal joy in his being" (as Williams describes it). He actually muffles Stanley's brutality as if he's afraid of it, as if he wants to be liked more.

Amy Ryan is wrong as Stella. She should be younger and peachier (she's meant to be pregnant) and more ambiguous. Chris Bauer's Mitch is dully so-so. Natasha Richardson is left to go it alone as Blanche, and under the circumstances she achieves a miracle. She hits all the desperate, tender, self-deceiving notes as Williams' fragile heroine who loses her mind. But she's acting alone.

Nowhere is Ms. Rich-ardson more believeable than when she nails Blanche's memorable line of heartbreak and yearning, "I don't want realism. I want magic!" Those words can only have poignant meaning in the theater, and they go to the heart of Williams.

Mr. Hall ends the evening with a bad cut in the closing moments, confirming his uncertain touch. But let me at least correct a frequent misunderstanding about the play itself. Blanche is often assumed to be a fading beauty in middle age. In fact, Williams tells us she's "about 30." Stella, her younger sister, should be five years younger, about 25. And Stanley and Mitch are meant to be 28 or 30, not fortysomething.

The moral is: Brits go home!

What I mean to say is that British directors are not infallible or necessarily "right," and that the American classics-like Chekhov, like Ibsen-may be revisited any time in the hope that someone will get close to the core of their eternal meaning.

Tradition, tradition …. Tradition!

Tradition, tradition …. Tradition!

Who day and night

Must scramble for a living

Feed a wife and children

Say his daily prayers?

The papa, the papa …. Tradition!

The papa, the papa …. Tradition!

The family battle in the musical itself is, of course, between Papa-otherwise known as the warm-hearted traditionalist Tevye, who must surely be the most famous Jewish milkman in the world-and his three pretty, modernist daughters. I imagine that, by now, more or less everyone knows Fiddler backwards. "A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof .... You may ask, why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word …. Tradition ."

Enough with the tradition already! On the other hand, if you're a Jew of a certain age-from before, say, bar mitzvahs served sushi-you'll probably be able to recite by heart "Sunrise, Sunset," Fiddler 's beloved song for every haimeshe bar mitzvah and wedding:

Sunrise, sunset

Sunrise, sunset

Swiftly fly the years

One season following another

Laden with happiness and tears .

Say what you like about Tevye and his nag of a wife, Golde, but they like a good cry.

Then again, a pogrom happens in Fiddler , forcing Tevye and his family to flee Anatevka. As Tevye puts it in one of his comfortingly kitschy dialogues with God, "I know we're the chosen people, but once in a while could you choose someone else?"

It's hokum, isn't it? Sweet, folksy hokum. Tevye's fortune-cookie wisdom belongs to pure showbiz sentiment-and how could it be otherwise? We're on Broadway! It's a show ! How else, I ask you, could a pogrom take place in a musical?

When the Russian tormentors wreck the wedding of Tevye's lovely daughter to the nebbishy tailor, their leader, known as the Constable, apologizes for it. "I am genuinely sorry," he tells Tevye. "You understand?" Even when he orders Tevye off his land, he apologizes for it! "I have nothing to do with it, don't you understand?"

Was ever a pogrom so mild and even hopeful? (Tevye leaves Anatevka for the Promised Land of America.) But were ever Nazis as nice as the ones in The Sound of Music ? Nothing has ever been particularly authentic in Fiddler , including its showbiz shtetl -"the cutest shtetl we've never had," as Irving Howe wrote disapprovingly of the musical when it first opened to acclaim in 1964. (But Howe was virtually alone.)

A year or two before Fiddler opened, another hit show on Broadway, the British satire Beyond the Fringe , had the young Jonathan Miller parodying Jews. Dr. Miller-who's currently in town directing King Lear -was the only Jew among the show's gifted quartet, all of whom had just graduated from Oxford and Cambridge. (The others were Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.) "I'd rather be working-class than a Jew," announced Alan Bennett.

"Good Lord, yes-there's no comparison, is there?" said Dudley Moore.

"In fact," Mr. Miller replied, and his response became famous, "I'm not really a Jew. I'm Jew- ish .... "

That's Fiddler on the Roof . It isn't the real thing. It's Jew- ish . It seems to me that every Jew in the show is a glorious showbiz cliché, including its parodiable "wise" old rebbe. Irving Howe believed its popularity among American Jews was a case of "unearned nostalgia" for a Jewish past they had forgotten. But as musicals go, it also happens to be a pretty good musical! And it's the last that Jerome Robbins-greatest of them all-choreographed and directed for Broadway.

True, one more rousing rendition of "If I Were a Rich Man" and I might shoot myself. But whatever its showbiz schmaltz, Fiddler has achieved such folkloric appeal in the last 40 years that to mess with it in any way is to tamper with a holy text. In her recent Talmudic discussion about Jewish culture and Fiddler in The Village Voice , Alisa Solomon wrote with amusing irreverence about the show's place in ancient Scripture:

"Nowadays lesbians get married under the chupah, boys talk baseball at their bar mitzvahs, and Passover Seders proclaim the rights of Palestinians. But one Jewish text has remained resistant to renovation, with strict prohibitions against any alterations ... Call it the 11th Commandment: Don't fuck with Fiddler ."

True! (as the current uproar proves). Yet the criticism that Tevye is played by a non-Jew, Alfred Molina, leaves me incredulous. I don't remember any fuss when Antonio Banderas, a Spaniard, played Guido, an Italian, in Nine . Actors act , and Mr. Molina is a very fine actor. He isn't Zero Mostel or Topol; nor is he trying to be. But where is it written that only a Jew can play a Jew? If that were the case, Laurence Olivier, the son of a priest, wouldn't have given us his memorable Shylock, and Nathan Lane, a Catholic, wouldn't have been able to play Max Bialystock.

"The sensation is as if you're sampling something that tastes great and looks Jewish but isn't entirely kosher," wrote Thane Rosenbaum about Fiddler , sparking the entire controversy in the Los Angeles Times . Now forgive me, but what kind of name is Thane for a nice Jewish boy?

No relation to Thane of Cawdor, I trust. And who would our self-appointed supervisor of the laws of kashrut , Thane Rosenbaum, prefer to see as Tevye-Jackie Mason?

Apparently, the Fiddler revival doesn't seem Jewish enough to some. It never was Jewish enough, but let that pass. On my desk is a photograph of my grandfather, who came to England from Eastern Poland at the turn of the century. To my delight, Grandpa Motl is dressed as he always dressed: formally, in a winged collar and pinstripe suit with spats, and he's carrying a gold-topped cane. I loved that man. He looks like a typical Edwardian gentleman who just might be a stage-door Johnny. (The spats and cane!) In fact, he was a devout Jew who spoke Hebrew and Yiddish, kept a strictly kosher home and prayed three times a day at the synagogue all his life. I don't think Grandpa Motl would have cared too much for the fakery of Fiddler , though he was known for his remarkable tolerance. He tolerated me.

But if you're going to revive Fiddler for what seems like the hundredth time, you either stage it as a museum piece to pander to the traditionalists, or you upset the milk cart by trying to breathe new life into it, as Mr. Leveaux has boldly done here. There's only so much he can do with a beloved war-horse, however. Mr. Leveaux-the distinguished British director of Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, as well as of the recent Nine and a particularly memorable production of Electra a few seasons ago-has honestly re-investigated the sacred Fiddler text and made it, if not new, new -ish.

The set, for one pure, beautifully lit thing, banishes the Chagall-inspired clichés of the original production to free the stage and create its own fairy-tale convention. Placing the orchestra onstage shocks us at first, but it has a cooling effect that also breaks with the past and takes us into unexpected territory. Some were scandalized when Peter Brook's production of Carmen put the orchestra onstage, too. But like Fiddler , the device shakes up our comfortable expectations, bringing fresh eyes to a battered old classic.

Mr. Leveaux and his creative team aren't nuts, however. They've re-created most of Jerome Robbins' fantastic choreography (except for the "Matchmaker" scene). We can't have a Fiddler without the bottle dance during the wedding, and we don't. There are times when the new production is almost too refined and pretty, as if it needs roughing up a bit to let fly. But I think Mr. Molina and company do very well, thank you. The point is, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised by this sacrilegious Fiddler , which will be the first time anyone's been surprised by it in 40 years.

Mi stai acoltando ? Are you with me? Antonio Banderas, he very, very, sexy. He some hunka meat. Si, e vero ! He so sexy, he make-a every girl swoon on the floor with what the show calls "boompa-boompa." Men, too! But he so short ! No problem-o. He have very big heart. Meesta Banderas, he play heartthrob Guido Contini.

Guido, he very, very sexy movie director who make-a the boompa-boompa on the floor, in the lobby, on the staircase, in the sauna. Che uomo ! What a guy. He like Fellini. But so short! All the women are his amore just the same. Like a beeg pizza pie! They cannot-'ow you say?-reezeest. Very beeg problemo for Guido. He sick of all this amore . He can take eet or leave eet! But Guido cannot reezeest either!

As the beeg theme-a song of the show goes:

Be Italian, be Italian,

Take a chance and try to steal a fiery kiss.

Be Italian, you rapscallion.

When you hold me, don't just hold me,

But hold this!

It very catchy.

There eez also a Little Guido. He eez short! Perche ? He little rapscallion. He 9-year-old version of Big Guido. Little Guido cloying Child Within. He look nothing like Big Guido. He onstage too much.

Va bene , even so. Carla, she sexy, sexy blond mistress of Guido. Carla is- come si dice? -a stereotypical slut with a heart of gold. Carla wear bodystocking and go boompa-boompa all day long. So what's it to you? She Jane Krakowski from Ally McBeal . She descend from heaven like the moon hit the sky! Fantastico .

Cootchie, cootchie, cootchie coo. I've got

A plan for what I'm gonna do to you, so hot

You're gonna steam, and scream,

And vibrate like a string I'm plucking-

That's our Carla! Not subtle, but a cootchie coo. Lady named Luisa, she very, very, troubled by cootchie coo. Well, can you blame her? Luisa eez the loyal, dignified wife to Guido. She bella madonna . Where have all her dreams gone? Now she suffer big time:

My husband spins fantasies.

He lives them, then gives them to you all.

While he was working on the film on ancient

Rome,

He made the slave girls take the gladiators

Home.

Lucky old gladiators. But Guido he suffer, too. He suffer for love. Guido big baby. He- come si dice ?-narcissist. But Guido eez blocked. Guido eez a genius . But Guido in despair! The press hounds him. Guido cannot create! What to do? Guido decides to go to spa in Venice! Where maestro David Leveaux will now create a flood.

Stage full of water, please advise.

Why is this flood different from any other flood? Because tonight, it's on Broadway! Director Leveaux's bold, cascading, Venetian water-rama has the cast merrily sloshing about the stage ankle-deep in water, or balancing somewhat gingerly above the fray on plastic chairs, trying not to get their tootsies wet like guests at a flooded Gritti Palace Hotel. I seem to have lost my Italian accent. But so did everyone else. Guido's certainly looking chirpier. He's gone for a paddle with his trousers rolled up to his knees, singing with some Germans:

This is the Grand Canal. (La la la la la la)

Its resemblance to life is not obscure

It is filled with the milk of human kindness

In spite of the fact that it's really a sewer.

It's an obscuer sewer. Guido is inspired at last! I don't know about Little Guido. Maybe he drowned. I blame it on the plot. The plot gets confused. It always has. Guido now seems to be making a film in water of a rococo opera about Casanova that strangely mirrors his own irrepressibly fiery plight. The big question is, of course, is this real or is he dreaming? Is it all going on inside Guido's head? Am I? Are you? Are we? Who knows!

Meanwhile, a French woman named Liliane La Fleur, played by Chita Rivera, is the ex-Folies Bergères star and despairing producer of Guido's movies. She seems to have hired a sexually ambiguous associate named Necrophorus, of all things, who serves as some kind of sour commentator. But let's not go into that now. " Pourquoi faut-il que je m'associe toujours avec les idiots ?" Madame La Fleur eventually protests to the idiots surrounding her, and thus she proceeds to relive her glory days in the Folies Bergères in a big production number involving audience participation.

" Bon soir . Hello zere? Deed you do eet? Deed you send me zer flowers .... "

Folies Bergères-

What a showing of color, costume, and

Dancing!

Not a moment in life could be more

Entrancing

Than an evening you spend aux Folies

Bergères.

That's not always the case, actually. But let's get back to Guido, who's in the spa catacombs with a cardinal. "My son," His Eminence tells him, "if you can believe in a world in which you can see the Devil, surely you must also believe in a world in which you can see an angel."

Whereupon Guido's mum enters to sing lovingly to Little Guido:

Don't conceal what you feel, Let it shine:

That you'd like to be always nine.

Let it shine ? That he always wants to be nine ? Anyway, the temptress Carla dresses up as a nun; Guido reminisces about Saraghina, the old buxom tart who initiated him into the joys of sex on a beach when he was but a little rapscallion; Guido's screen muse, Claudia, grows disillusioned; Guido strongly identifies with St. Sebastian; Venice floods; Claudia says ciao ; Luisa says ciao ; and I don't think I'll be sticking round much longer myself. As Little Guido sings so sweetly at the close in his farewell number entitled, "Getting Tall," when the depressed Guido decides not to shoot himself:

Guido, you're not crazy, you're all right.

Everyone wants everyone in sight ...

But knowing you have no one if you try to

Have them all

Is part of tying shoes,

Part of starting school,

Part of scraping knees if we should fall-

Part of getting tall.

Little Guido, tall at last. I don't know about Antonio Banderas. Now, that was totally uncalled for. Antonio Banderas, he very, very sexy. He sing, he tango, he send whole world wild with the boompa-boompa, O.K.?

The set design of Mr. Leveaux's new production is by Scott Pask, with a nod to Renzo Piano's cool plastic modernism; the costumes are by Vicki Mortimer with an eye on 1960's Vogue . The book is by Arthur Kopit, and the music and lyrics are by Maury Yeston, who received the 1982 Tony Award for Best Score. The original production was the Tony Award winner for Best Musical

Should you, by chance, disagree, one or the other of us will have to shoot ourselves. You! But it will not come to that. Ms. Wanamaker, in David Leveaux's remarkable production of Sophocles' Electra at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, has the audience spellbound. Who would have thought that a 2,400-year-old story of matricide would prove so popular–and on Disneyfied Broadway?

There's a thought. Neither Sophocles nor Ms. Wanamaker are star names in New York. (Until now.) Which is why the usual bottom-line producers wouldn't invest in the production (though it had already played to acclaim in England and at the McCarter Theater, at Princeton University). If only the ruling elites of Broadway would have a little more faith–not just in our intelligence, but in Theater itself. The production shows the way! And the packed houses and extended run are a sweet justice.

Ms. Wanamaker's Electra is a wonderfully original creation–an elemental, furious creature , both savage and childlike, a gaping wound, a broken image of obsessed eternal grief. She is a physically small actress giving a performance of staggering size. I had known her only in lighter roles–her gamine looks imply the impish rather than the tragic. Yet from her first astonishing appearance, it's clear that she will compel us to meet her on a different, higher plane.

She first appears wearing the mask of tragedy. She stands on a ladder, peering into the palace of her murdered father. She's dwarfed by the frayed, old overcoat that she wears. Of course! It must be her beloved father's coat–worn as a living memory, a talisman, a shroud.

She descends in the white mask (which seems strangely natural to us). She is like a Beckett tramp. But her spiked hair reveals a bloody scalp. This is an Electra who tears her hair out with inconsolable grief. Then she removes the tragic mask, and reveals her own face of terrible tragic destiny.

Her plaintive rasping voice can frighten and touch us deeply. She is uncluttered and unfettered–an essence. She not only conveys pain but is its personification. Her first words are delivered to the gods as a calm ritual of primal furious need, like a fervent unanswered prayer: "Divine light, sweet air, again hear my pain." In her father's death is her death.

Sophocles' Electra –the spare 90-minute adaptation is by Frank McGuinness–is a story of obsessive vengeance in a society that has lost its moral bearings. Clytemnestra, the hated mother of Electra, lives with her lover, Aegisthus. They murdered Agamemnon–Electra's father and Clytemnestra's husband–on his victorious return from Troy. The unforgiving Electra–"The world has turned bad and so have I"–awaits the return of her brother, Orestes, and longed-for retribution.

There are fascinating shades of Hamlet : The murdered King is replaced by the Queen and her lover; the heir's fate is vengeance and a descent into further chaos. There's the Freudian interpretation of excessive parental love: the father and Electra, the mother and Hamlet. Greek drama, after all, is an ancient form of public psychology. But at center, Electra is a timeless moral debate and argument about fierce opposites: betrayal and forgiveness; vengeance and compromise; memory and forgetting; honoring the dead and honoring the living.

These are vast, universal issues, which should need no justification today in modern terms. Greek drama is modern (though it's obviously not bourgeois tragedy in search of "closure"). The truth and relentless grief of Electra is as contemporary as the ashes in Cambodia or Sarajevo; its fractured moral landscape is all around us; its family divided by a form of psychic madness and unresolved hatreds isn't unknown in our own families.

It's why Mr. Leveaux, the director of Electra , points out that the play cannot be made "more convenient by making it more conversational." It cannot be made more convenient; a question of matricide is most inconvenient . These perpetual dilemmas of making great and already popular dramas somehow easier, more accessible, more "relevant" to modern times, are wearisome. They cannot be easier–as pitiless fate and profound grief cannot be trivialized.

It's a question of balance between the present in the past–and the past in the present–and Mr. Leveaux has got most of it splendidly right. The expressionist wreck of a set, designed by Johan Engels, evokes the ruinous wars of a timeless, blighted landscape literally rooted in the earth. I was less happy with the intended coup de théâtre when the inside of the palace is ultimately revealed. Mr. Leveaux has no need of such theatricality when his production is characterized by its essential simplicity and stillness.

Then again, though there are some weaknesses in the ensemble, Claire Bloom is a beautiful, formidably reasonable Clytemnestra in perfect steely counterpoint to Ms. Wanamaker in their key scenes together. "I am not a cruel woman," she says (and has us believing her). "But I do abuse you because you abuse me so often …"

The secret to Ms. Wanamaker's superb performance is that she is uncannily both an adult and a child. What was murderously done to her as a child has never been resolved in her adulthood. In an elemental sense, she remains dangerously unformed. She remains an unbalanced child of grief whose tragedy is that she cannot be anything else.

Racine's Phèdre is another Greek tragedy of obsession–incest. But the overwrought London production with Diana Rigg was a disappointment in its limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater. In director Jonathan Kent's heady attempts to blow away the so-called cobwebs, he has reduced the classic tragedy merely to the level of the frenzied neurotic and the pseudo-chic, kicking it all up a notch with a form of acting histrionics that I thought had died unmourned in the 19th century.

Maria Bjornson has, for one, costumed poor Toby Stephens in pleated black vinyl and leather so that his Hippolytus looks as if he's leaping about in a gay version of The Pirates of Penzance . Princess Aricia's off-the-shoulder number with the ludicrous, voluminous train has an actress inside–Joanna Roth, who works the costume. Diana Rigg is more the crone cocktail look with bobbed red hair by Vidal Sassoon.

But that's enough of fashion. This is the first production I've seen in which its leading actors beat up the scenery. Ms. Rigg and Mr. Stephens do not chew it, they hit it, they hug it, they pose against it (in profile). Passions are running high, you see. Too high! Mr. Stephens sets off at such a frantic pace and tone he leaves himself no room to maneuver. When his mum confesses to him, in effect: "I'm in love with you," she might just as well have said, "Hate your outfit."

Others in the ensemble are superior, particularly the fearsome Oenone of the immensely assured veteran Barbara Jefford, herself a distinguished Phèdre. Diana Rigg follows her Mayfair Medea of recent memory with her flagellating Phèdre, and the outcome is theatrically mixed.

The swoops of her voice spitting out Ted Hughes' tumble of earthy, venomous words in the new free-form adaptation, the thrilling attack and musicality of Ms. Rigg, are beyond question. Her self-loathing, convulsive disbelief at her illicit incestuousness is coldly effective, her frenzied jealousy witheringly right. Yet, for all that, she fails to touch us. We remain remote from her polished, too stylized tragedy. The key scene with her stepson fails to ignite or shame. Ms. Rigg conveys a response to obsessive love, not the thing itself.

Her death scene is thrown away, which is odd. She appears to nod off upright in a peculiar chair. With all the hysterics going on, she might have given us a good death scene. In his 1950's review of Edwige Feuillère's Phèdre–Ms. Feuillère was considered the greatest actress on earth by some–Ken Tynan liked only one moment. "No one drops dead like Mme. Feuillère," he wrote approvingly of her mortal slump .

The last image of Zoë Wanamaker's Electra is of blood dripping onto her Greek mask from the heavens. We needn't belabor the point. Her magnificent performance stands comparison with anyone's, and stands alone.