APHRODITE is stretched out, as if on a grave, or maybe like a cat in the sun, ready to play with a mouse.

She is in the coolest room of an Edwardian England country house, with its stone floor and pillars, but you can feel the heat rising in her. "Respect," says Emily Wright's Aphrodite, making eyes and reaching for a violin. "Respect. It's not too much to ask for. Not when you're a god. A goddess. Not when you're me. Me, Aphrodite - lust - desire - sex - carnal knowledge - ecstasy."

In his new version of a Euripides tale with 2,500 years on the clock, Actors Of Dionysus director and writer David Stuttard has distilled the essence of Aphrodite into a series of bullet points.

No wonder this play lasts only 70 minutes, you may be thinking, but Stuttard's skill lies in finding exactly the right words to convey bold, broad emotional brush strokes and make dramas of an epic, timeless scale wholly human, immediate and involving.

Behind Aphrodite, the rest of the cast one by one click fingers and come to life stiffly, suggesting they are puppets in her game, or maybe lab rats in a man-watching exercise to establish where responsibility lies for our actions: with the gods, with ourselves or in our genes?

When the first word of the play, the first dish of the day, is "respect" served raw and bloody, you know trouble is afoot.

Here in the boring backwater of Trosden, sex goddess Aphrodite responds to Hippolytus's self-imposed sex ban by cursing this chaste country sportsman to being chased by his mad yet undeniably foxy young stepmother, Phaidra (the darkly tangled, wheelchair-clamped Leila Crerar). As with Juliet in Romeo And Juliet, there is little that the Nurse of the play (Kaye Quinley) can do to stem the tide of inexorable sexual expression. Hippolytus (Kevin Johnson) is wrapped up in his religious fundamentalism - a state of cleanliness that even keeps his boots in a state of perma-polish despite a day in the field - and so he rejects Phaidra. Cue her suicide and suicide note, accusing Hippolytus of raping her. Cue Hippolytus's showdown with his enraged father, Theseus (Roger Ringrose).

For all its contemporary resonance, Stuttard distances his drama from the soapy waters of EastEnders by giving the language of Theseus in particular a clipped click of the heels and the starched stiffness of a tight collar. Contemporary yet classical, this hot and bothered production puts the hip into Hippolytus.

Box office: 0845 961 3000

Updated: 10:05 Tuesday, February 03, 2004