BWW Reviews: MEDEA, Almeida Theatre, October 1 2015

Rachel Cusk's version of Medea is set in streets not so far from Islington's Almeida Theatre, where yummy-mummies fret about husbands on business trips to Paris and kids whose parents are not divorced are more the exception than the rule. But the "middle-class problems" of whether to let the help go home before the Ocado delivery arrives and dealing with mothers brainwashed by Daily Mail editorials are not the problems of writer Medea. She is bothered - nay, consumed - with her husband walking out on her for a younger model. She plots a terrible revenge.

Euripides' play speaks across centuries because it explores themes that lie at the heart of relationships between men and women whether they live in Ancient Greece or Modern Gospel Oak: Children; Middle Age; Infidelity; Ambition; Boredom and so much more. Of course, it is vanishingly rare for consequences to be as extreme as they are for Medea and Jason (and their two sons), but there are seldom no consequences either - hence the play's enduring appeal, no matter how hard it is to watch.

Kate Fleetwood's Medea is introduced to us as a sullen, silent recipient of her mother's barbs, hiding behind her fringe like a teenager being told off for having an untidy room. She is not silent for long! Soon she is railing against her fellow mothers (a doll-wielding Chorus) with whom she refuses to fit in, repulsed by their fixations on gossip, husbands and their offspring. She's soon shouting down the mobile at her estranged husband Jason (a smug, self-assured, stupid Justin Salinger) - there's a lot of shouting in this play - with her boys caught in the crossfire as she's bullied into selling the family home. There's a fine turn from Richard Cant as Aegeus, a television producer for whom Medea ghosts a book in return for his telling her story (that skewers Jason, natch) in a TV adaptation.

I confess that I was looking forward to the shouting coming to a close as Medea wreaks her terrible revenge, when the Wallpaper magazine set gave way to what looked like the surface of Mars burning under a blazing sun. (I was irresistibly reminded of the Mutants Bar in Total Recall and began wondering how Sharon Stone would play Medea - at 90 minutes all-through on less than comfortable seats, the attention does wander a little.) I know it's director Rupert Goold's reference to the Sun God Helios from the original, but it was a transformation that jarred like missing a step walking downstairs.

Then a half-man, half-woman Messenger (Charlotte Randle) appears to tell us the fates of Medea and Jason in rhyming couplets that proved to be another distraction, dissipating the power of the horrific climax still further.

Ultimately, though showing due respect to its source material, this version of Medea (at The Almeida Theatre until 14 November) drifts into over-complicated tricksiness just when it should focus on its solar plexus-shattering punchline.

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