Despite the fact that Dame Helen Mirren is appearing at our National Theatre in Racine’s greatest play, my local Waterstone’s stocks not a single copy of anything by France’s foremost dramatist. I don’t think this a reflection on Waterstone’s. It’s just that we’ve never got along with French classical tragedy, partly because we’re so used to Shakespeare. Dr Johnson said that comparing Shakespeare to Corneille (though he might equally have said Racine) was like com­paring a great shaggy oak forest to a neatly clipped hedge. But neatly clipped hedges have their beauty too.

The first thing you have to do to enjoy Racine is forget every­-thing you’ve ever seen or read of Shakespeare, with all his fools, clowns, bawdy puns and loose ends, as well as his vast, chaotic vocabulary of some 30,000 words. Admire instead the glassy purity of Racine, the way he manages to say everything he wants to about life, love and death in an icily ­controlled vocabulary of only about 3,000 words.

Of course, this is not exactly Racine, but the acc­laimed Ted Hughes translation, first presented in 1998. Hughes doesn’t just translate Racine into English, he translates him into Ted Hughes. As a result, we have some unclassical skull-splitting roars and avalanches, and a whole menagerie of animals simply not there in the original, including bats and octopuses.

There is also some uncomfort­able colloquialism: “When a father judges his own son, He remains a daddy.” But granted that trans­lating Racine into English is impossible, free-form adaptation is the only hope. Hughes’s version certainly has plenty of raw power, and when acted as superbly as it is here, all your reservations evaporate.

Phèdre is in love with her stepson Hippolytus — which counts as incest. Believing her absent husband, Theseus to be dead,she declares her love for him. But Hippolytus is revolted, not least as he himself is secretly in love with Aricia, granddaughter of Theseus’s ancient enemy Erechtheus.

Mirren’s Phèdre is alternately regal, abject, deludedly optimistic, scheming, sarcastic, mordant and vindictive, a middle-aged woman hopelessly in thrall to her passion for Dominic Cooper’s brooding hunk of a Hippolytus. It’s unlikely that Racine’s original, periwigged Louis XIV audience thought it appropriate to laugh, but here there is some wince-inducing laughter at this grotesque mismatch, emotionally if not literally the confession of a mother to a son.

Extremes of human passion, especially romantic, can be comical without detracting one whit from our sympathy. Minor characters often remain on stage, as static as a frieze, during the long speeches, but their stillness and watchfulness are intensely dramatic, especially in the case of Aricia’s maid, Ismène (Chipo Chung). Ruth Negga is subtle and delicate as Aricia herself, and John Shrapnel has a terrific set piece as Théramène, Hippolytus’s tutor. The acting all round is so good that Mirren is very much first among equals, rather then the outright star.

Bob Crowley’s set is stupendous, beautifully lit by Paule Constable. We are looking at a terrace side on, high over the blue Aegean, with ancient walls of monumental limestone. The absolute purity of colour, azure and gold, and hard, clean lines of sunlight and shade are brilliantly attuned to the hard, clean lines of the drama, interrupted only by scattered sprigs of ominously withered olive. Nicholas Hytner’s direction is faultless, and it’s a bold, successful stroke to have Aricia reappear in the final scene (she is absent in the original), dragging on the mangled corpse of Hippolytus in a bloody hessian sack — “the latest prize of the triumphant gods”, in Théramène’s bitter words. This is far more Elizabethan or Senecan than French classical, but it works.

The English have had more than three centuries to take Racine to their hearts. If it ever happens, it will be due to productions of such stark force and passion as this.

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