THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
London’s newest theatre @sohoplace continues a great opening run with this exemplary production of a play from 2,500 years ago which still manages to enrapture audiences today.
Sophie Okonedo brings her familiar mercurial brilliance to the role of one of literature’s most notorious protagonists, a woman laid bare by grief and rage, intent on exacting a terrible revenge on the men who wronged her. She banishes memories of great predecessors in the role, bringing more vulnerability to it, for example, than Diana Rigg could manage.
It’s no mean feat because the text has her bemoaning and bemoaning and not really changing gear, in the way Greek heroines do. But Okonedo anchors the role, not making her modern exactly (that would be a step too far) but rendering her as recognizably human. The modern dress staging helps.
She is perfectly matched by wonderfully versatile Ben Daniels who plays all the male parts. He’s the kids’ tutor, he’s the patrician Creon (the King of Corinth who seals her fate when he banishes her), he’s Aegeus (an initially trusted friend) and most importantly as her husband Jason, the warrior alpha-male whose infidelity with Creon’s daughter leads him to abandoning Medea, thus setting in train the tragedy to follow.
Robinson Jeffers’ adaptation is clear and taut and the dialogue modern but never anachronistic, and he and director Dominic Cooke deftly incorporate the conventions of Greek Tragedy without flummoxing a young modern audience who might not be familiar with them. It’s a tight 90 minutes without an interval.
Vicki Mortimer’s simple in the round design demarcates three concentric circles - a central stage which is the landing staircase from a basement, where all the dastardly deeds are done, a wider ring where characters are ‘off,’ and the audience space where 3 Women of Corinth (the Greek Chorus) sit among the audience, occasionally startling their neighbors.
The great Marion Bailey is a rock of good sense as the Nurse and Ben Connor and Heath Gee-Burrowes are suitably winning as the children.
Daniels, in black combats and DM boots, dons different jackets to delineate the three male leads and when ‘off’ prowls the action sometimes languidly, sometimes menacingly. Lucy Cullingford’s movement direction has him circling in slo-mo and, when he’s Jason, creating the warrior shapes from Greek statuary. Daniels has the wiry, ripped torso to pull this off.
Medea’s dilemma echoes that of many ‘women scorned’, from Princess Diana to Vicky Pryce, and Okonedo and Daniels’ married couple spark off each other in very familiar ways. It’s great on how marriages, when they sour, are reduced to a ledger, balancing who brought what, and then of course who takes what. Jason accuses her of jeopardizing everything with her selfishness, arguing that his affair with the King’s daughter might potentially make him King and benefit them both. She reminds him that it's her powers (she’s famed as a sorceress) which helped make him in the first place and he’s the one who is ungrateful.
What makes Medea continually fascinating is that she refuses to occupy the submissive role into which she was cast. She’s a woman, a foreigner, and an abandoned wife who is expected to feel shame, but she doesn’t, instead she gets angry and Okonedo makes that very modern sensibility palpably real.
