The fate of Jean Racine’s plays in Britain has been to be studied rather than performed. It therefore seems ironic that in translating his most famous early tragedy Andromaque from page to stage director Declan Donnellan makes central to his production a potent symbol of the schoolroom, the wooden-backed stackable chair.

A line of these unlovely objects stretches across the otherwise bare Oxford Playhouse stage at the start of this intense and gripping drama, performed in French as a co-production by Théâtre du Nord, Lille, and Cheek by Jowl. The simplicity of the staging is in marked contrast to the play’s premiere in 1667 when its director — Molière, no less — made use of the latest in elaborate stage gadgetry and Italian painted scenery.

Players garbed in a monochrome mixture of uniforms and modern-ish, semi-formal dress rise from the chairs and move forward to do their business, sometimes when the playwright has supplied no business for them to do. A neat touch from Donnellan is that characters sometimes inhabit the action when they shouldn’t really be there — hearing others’ deeds and motives discussed, listening to what is said about themselves, occasionally prefiguring what they will shortly be doing or saying.

Conversely, some crucial episodes are not presented to the eyes of the audience at all. One such is the climactic slaying by Oreste (Xavier Boiffier) of Epirus’s ruler Pyrrhus (Christophe Gregoire) at his wedding to Andromaque (Camille Cayol), an unwilling bride who has consented to the union only to save her son Astyanax (Mathieu Spinosi) from the clutches of the Greeks. The murder is suggested instead when a torrent of confetti raining down on the nuptials is transformed on an instant to a deep red.

The device serves to heighten the drama of the great scene that follows, in which Orestes goes to report the fulfilment of his mission to the woman who ordered it. This is the woman he loves but who has rejected him, the jealous Hermione (Camille Japy), who is furious at having been thrown over by Pyrrhus.

Not so furious, though, that she is happy to have lost him for ever. She now conveniently forgets her role in the matter and demands to know who suggested the dreadful deed. “Qui te l’a dit?” she screams, with all the horror we have come to expect (thanks to Callas?) from a Greek woman in grief.

The operatic nature of the drama will be heightened for many by the use of surtitles. This neatly overcomes the problem that has largely been responsible for keeping Racine off the British stage for so long, that of the impossibility of a successful translation. Here the polished Alexandrines pour from the characters as they were meant to be spoken, in all their venom, might and beauty, to be understood by those who can (though I am told that even the best French speakers are finding trouble with audibility this week) and admired for the stateliness, the steeliness, of their sound by the rest of us.

Andromaque continues until Saturday. 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).