“You’ve got a ready-made hotbed of lust and sex. Betrayal. Hatred. Flaming, poisonous crowns and murdered children. Vengeance and passion. More girl power than a ten-woman hen night. Frankly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all this would be theatrical enough without needing to signal every single moment of drama with little drum rolls, as this production did.” Madeline Wright ★★★★★

Medea ★★★★★

Review by Madeline Wright

If you put on a production of Medea, you’ve got a Greek tragedy of epic proportions. You’ve got a ready-made hotbed of lust and sex. Betrayal. Hatred. Flaming, poisonous crowns and murdered children. Vengeance and passion. More girl power than a ten-woman hen night. Frankly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all this would be theatrical enough without needing to signal every single moment of drama with little drum rolls, as this production did. By the time they’d added crashing noises on the keyboard at moments of extreme passion, it was starting to feel as if I’d accidentally wandered into a stand-up comedy show at Butlins.

Unfortunately, this obviousness and clunkiness was to be the keynote for the whole night. Everything began well enough, with the chatty Nurse bringing the audience up to speed and setting the scene, then the entrance of Nina Kristofferson’s dynamic, screeching Medea seemed highly promising. In fact, she had a lot of potential, often building up to moments of harpy-like power – which were then spoilt utterly in some places by undermining the tension with a silly dance or by grabbing a pair of cymbals at crucial moments in her speech. The chorus of three women were excellent in terms of their strong voices and commanding presence, but they too managed to spoil it at times by sidling over to the piano, saxophone and drum kit and then jamming awkwardly over their own speeches.

Another problem was that the production often seemed confused. The chorus, for example, wore Edwardian-style dresses, but Jason was in a linen suit. Medea, on the other hand, was in a sea-green stretchy, velvety dress. The set was rather beautiful, with tawny animal skins on the floor and a crown-like gold semicircle which transformed into Medea’s chariot – but again, it didn’t seem to symbolise anywhere or anything in particular. The music also lacked coherence, being a peculiar mix of honky-tonk rhythms, a Chicago-esque raunchy number, and the most successful of the musical pieces, a mournful blues harmonica threading out an atmospheric tune over the voices. If they’d stuck to just the harmonica, it would have been starkly beautiful.

This all makes for a patchy and very frustrating performance – I couldn’t get over the feeling that there was such a lot of wasted potential here, particularly in terms of the actors whose power and gravitas was curtailed far too often by the director’s insistence on clumsy obviousness. Most frustrating of all, though, was the awkwardness of the text itself, which seemed to jump about all over the place – one minute it was the eloquent language of high tragedy, the next it was all “kids”, “slag” and “tart”. At this point, I’d like to make a special mention of the last and most memorable scene. Picture this: Medea and Jason are onstage together. Bloody vengeance has occurred. They’ve exchanged stark, harsh words about vengeance and betrayal. She’s about to drive off in the sun-god’s chariot. He’s on his knees, weeping with grief. And what does she have to say to him?

“Fuck off.”

Not quite what Euripides had in mind, I suspect.