Jean Racine's 17th-century tragedy is a handsome study of the destructiveness of love, and the central role of Phèdre — the Queen of Athens, here realised by Helen Mirren — is psychologically rich.

This is the story of a woman who, while her husband Theseus is mysteriously absent, falls in love with her stepson, the sexily post-adolescent Hippolytus. It’s a passion doomed to have grave consequences.

The male characters in Racine’s play are important. Half of it is about a son who believes he has lost his father, half about a father who believes he has lost his son. Yet it’s the two men’s connections with Phèdre that impel the drama inexorably.

We don’t see Phèdre and Hippolytus together until 40 minutes into the play’s two hours (there is no interval), but when the moment comes it is electric. After Phèdre declares her feelings for her stepson, he has to take a shower to cool off — the production’s one snatch of pure comedy.

The most compelling moment comes later when Theseus tells Phèdre that Hippolytus’s affectations have gravitated elsewhere: an ashen Mirren registers the information and then, alone, feels beneath her ribcage for the “smouldering” resentment that threatens to “burst into hard flames”.

Phèdre’s passions are complex, and she sees herself as unreadable. Indeed, the whole of Racine’s play is clouded by uncertainty. Mirren evokes Phèdre’s conflicted identity with skittish command. She is a heroic lover, yet also viciously self-lacerating, capable of being rhapsodic, delicate, hysterically imploring, tyrannically possessive, haunted and ultimately quavery and spectral. Dominic Cooper’s Hippolytus is an idler with a gift for lofty rhetoric.

Cooper speaks with lambent clarity, but moves awkwardly — perhaps deliberately, since Theseus actually describes his character as “stiff”.

Margaret Tyzack, hunched and doddery as Phèdre’s old nurse Oenone, does an impressive job of being both stern and humane, while Stanley Townsend’s ruggedly imposing Theseus bristles with menace, and Ruth Negga is gutsily innocent as Hippolytus’s secondary love interest Aricia.

It’s Mirren, though, who anchors proceedings, and every time she steps on to Bob Crowley’s austere set of battered stone — which looks disarmingly as though it’s made of Stilton — one’s pulse sprints.

Instead of the metrical regularity and rhyme of Racine’s original, Nicholas Hytner’s confidently directed production uses the thrustingly sinewy blank verse of Ted Hughes — which, characteristically, abounds with animal imagery, as when Venus is likened to a tiger and Theseus recalls being trapped in a cave where he lay “under the showering dung of bats”.

This is only the third time a play by Racine has been staged at the National. The French dramatist can seem a little too serenely severe to British audiences, but here in Hughes’s version his writing comes throbbingly alive. Hughes observed that the experience of the play resembles “an express going through the station without much deceleration — you either jump aboard cleanly, or you miss it”. The comment is apt, for whether cleanly or not, you too should feel the ride.