To avoid the risk of any awkward citation, I'm going to stray from quoting this story in my workbook solely because this is out for the whole world to see, I will work on quotes in my final paper. I found this version to be very stark, miserable, and depressing. But it felt real to me. This Hippolytus was certainly different from the other two in the sense that he was despicable and impure in any sexual sense. In my opinion, though, he was still strikingly similar to both Seneca and Racine's Phaedra. They all were trying to abstain from love in some form and although Kane's Hippolytus had seemingly everyone in the kingdom in his pants, he did not show a flicker of love except for two specific places. One would be where Phaedra mentions Lena and he immediately shuts her down, thus shutting off those emotions. The second is the brief embrace he shares with Strophe. It is a small stage direction that really stood out to me.
I think it is certainly legitimate to say that Hippolytus abstained from love and it is certainly not a good argument to say he was intimate with others. Prostitutes likewise give and receive sex on a large scale and you cannot tell me that they love every person they give favors to. The same is in Hippolytus' case. I think Sarah Kane made him more realistic by making him sexual. He is creepy and so unfeeling, almost like Kane herself put many of her depressive qualities in him.
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