Carrie Cracknell’s new version of Medea strikes with overwhelming and rather puzzling force. The royal palace has been done up to resemble a clapped-out Spanish villa that seems to date from about 1983 if the kennel-sized TV set is anything to go by. (Weren’t TVs massive then? And always brown.) The villa’s peeling wallpaper and suppurating marble edifices form a balcony that straddles an eerie little copse, which manages to look both indoors and outdoors at once. These warring effects — villa and forest — do little to elucidate the play’s simple story: jilted Medea avenges herself on love rat Jason by murdering their two sons and bumping off his new sex-bunny. Helen McCrory’s Medea is terribly, terribly English while Jason is played by a black Briton, Danny Sapani. Odd that. Euripides had it the other way around. Jason, a local prince. Medea, a blow-in from the Black Sea or, in today’s parlance, a Romanian.
Despite these muddles and own goals, the show is gripping throughout and never becomes earnest, obscure or boring, which, let’s face it, Greek tragedy can often be.
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