Agrippina is blind to the fact that her assurance is now baseless and this proves fatal for Kevin McDidd’s emptily heroic Britannicus who, in this sardonic staging, walks into a trap up a staircase festooned with welcoming white flowers.Robert David MacDonald’s rhyming translation has vigour, velocity and moments of blackly comic balefulness. Full of tortured, wall-clawing guilt as the eponymous stepmother in Phedre, Diana Rigg here draws upon her skills as a supreme mistress of high comedy to project the lofty disdain of Agrippina, whom she plays as a sophisticate with a sublimely imperturbable sense of her own entitlement.Rigg creates a superb moment in the long private session with the son. Nero has been reduced to apparent tearful submission by the encounter and the shameless rapidity and completeness with which Rigg’s Agrippina switches back from distraction to smothering, smiling possessiveness produces gasps of delighted outrage The delight is short-lived, though. But you also keep catching glimpses of a sulky, uncertain little boy who looks as though he expects to be rebuked at any moment. There is an embarrassing, suppressed violence in him and you notice that while his hands hover hungrily over Joanna Roth’s Junia, something inhibits them from actually touching her.Emphasising the undignified gap between the image Nero would like to project and the Agrippina-thwarted reality, Stevens’s performance bravely and rightly provokes uneasy laughter. Their head-on struggle for power results both in ironic political somersaults (the affronted Agrippina intriguing with the very man she ousted) and in grave danger for the love between the heroic Britannicus and the virtuous Junia, which Nero contemplates with intense jealousy.From his first bustling entrance, worriedly fiddling with his cuff and followed by some brutal-looking guards, Stevens’s dark-suited emperor is a wonderfully sinister/pathetic mix of arrestedness and nervy assertiveness. He owes his eminence to his mother, Agrippina, who has committed all manner of crimes to put him on the throne, cunningly engineering the disinheritance of the rightful heir, Britannicus.But now Nero has begun to resent being thought of as his mother’s docile puppet.

A matriarch continues to spell disaster for him in the same director’s excellent modern- dress staging of Racine’s Britannicus, an artly chosen companion piece which now joins Phedre in rep at the Albery.This time Stevens plays the young emperor Nero, six months into a reign which will shortly topple from decency into bloody tyranny. Playing Hippolytus in Jonathan Kent’s current production of Phedre, he splendidly signals the insecure, square-jawed heroics of a high-minded youth suddenly confronted by the incestuous passion of his step-mother. BRITANNICUS ALBERY THEATRE

LONDON
IT IS to be hoped that Toby Stevens has less trouble with his real-life mum, Maggie Smith, than he has been experiencing with his fictional mothers on stage lately. Now go away and do some proper sculpture!’”Some primeval-looking Cypriot sheep and Cypriot churches have started to creep into Salmon’s pictures “Those churches remind me of toys. I always expect a big wind-up key to be on the side.” It all seems to fit into the Salmon world view.Older etchings by Chris Salmon can be seen at the Artichoke Workshop and Greenwich Printmakers stall at the Contemporary Print Fair, Barbican Concourse Gallery (also until Sunday). There will be an exhibition of his oil paintings at the Mason’s Arms, Battersea, in March. These were the 30 etchings he was preparing for an exhibition at the Clapham Art Gallery in Venn Street, London (until Sunday).

Here are policemen playing leapfrog, a girl crouched in front of a church, several cats, more people dressed as animals, and a man running on a beach, his own version of “Skegness is so bracing” poster.Salmon is refreshingly isolated from the current wave of British art, which he admires from a distance for its cheekiness and punkish sense of humour He is 38 and came to the work late. If Salmon does not know what he is doing, his etchings certainly do. There is a purposefulness about their peculiarity which is arresting. There is a girl in a drab dress dancing with a tiger, people with animals on their heads, a pope climbing up a ladder, businessmen calmly falling through the air, four men looking out of a box, a goat alone on a stage…
In the living-room, the walls were bare but the floor was full of pictures. And fantasists who blow away online baddies are no match for the real thing. “The big boys who are interested in money, they are the really scary ones, not the hackers,” says Danks.

“They’re the ones that can kill you.”`Phreak’ is published by Victor Gollancz, pounds 9.99. IN CONTRAST to his serenely articulate etchings, Chris Salmon is a mass of unfinished ideas expressed in half-sentences and inadequate hand gestures. He seems constantly exasperated yet amused by something he cannot quite find the words for. “There was an incident in a curry house in Whitechapel where someone was scalped. Some attacks are assumed to be racist when they are actually inter-gang stuff.”Breaking the law is a cut-throat business. As George discovers, there is competition between the little gangs on the Internet and the big gangs on the streets.

Forest Gate, meanwhile, is described as living and breathing in “a cheap clutter of fast food, deal-making and discounting”.Since the Krays ruled the streets, things have changed. Phreak does have an old-style villain, an ex-boxer, but a new kind too – a Bengali protection gang. “It wasn’t an exchange as we recognise it but racks and racks of cloned mobile phones. A mobile-phone scam seemed like a good way to show how the East End looks nowadays.”Danks maps out her territory lovingly with its “third world Whipps Cross Hospital”, the high street in “a mist of transmission fumes”, and the grim boarded-up shops and premises rented out to charities which “recycle fifth-hand clothes”.