Bajazet
Bajazet is Racine’s most violent drama; it ends, like Phèdre, with a female character’s on-stage suicide, here the culmination of a vividly described sequence of off-stage murders. The setting, in a claustrophobic space within the harem at Constantinople, menaced from both without and within, seems to license a violence of emotion as well as of deed. Violent too are the repeated reversals of fortune, and the terrifying acceleration of the play towards its inexorable catastrophe.
Alan Hollinghurst’s translation of Bajazet premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 1990.