Medea (Sherman Cymru)

I admit that a Greek Tragedy about an abandoned wife who murders her child as revenge on her husband did not immediately appeal to me. The most serious piece of theatre I've seen is Hamlet, and Shakespeare is comparatively modern when put next to Euripides, who wrote Medea in the year 431 BC. For me all the appeal was in the actress playing the title role - Rachael Stirling, daughter of Diana Rigg who played the same role to great acclaim just twenty years earlier. I have been a fan of Stirling since she made her name on TV in 'Tipping the Velvet' (I was 18, of course that particular drama was going to make me a fan of both Stirling and Keeley Hawes!) so I couldn't miss the opportunity to see such a good actress perform at a local(ish) venue.


I imagine if Mike Leigh ever made a film of Euripides' Ancient Greek tragedy it would be something like this updated  version. The play deals with Medea, the wife of Jason (and the Argonauts), who is filled with anger towards her husband after he leaves her to marry a younger woman; in the original play Medea is a barbarian woman and the 'other woman' is daughter to a King.
Mike Bartlett moves this version of Medea from ancient Greece (Corinth) to a generic middle class suburbia, complete with an Ikea-style, dolls house-like set. Stirling's Medea is now a sweary, smoking city girl who the other characters, and audience, are slightly scared of. Her performance is brilliant, Medea goes from depressive to truly disturbing scene where she plunges her hand into a pan of boiling water, a scene made even more shocking by Medea's son watching in still silence; to pathetic, when she offers to have a baby for her childless male neighbour. Towards the end she becomes really worrying and scary, particularly when she pretends (as it turns out) to be amicable towards he ex-husband and his soon to be wife, these scenes are truly worrying because we know things are about to turn very dark. Even at the end the fact that I still felt some sympathy towards Medea was a testament to the performance of Rachael Stirling.
The majority of rest of the cast were just as good at their parts, Amelia Lowdell was instantly dis-likable as Medea's snobbish work colleague, Pam, as was Christopher Ettridge (Reg from Goodnight Sweetheart) as the landlord; Lu Corfield, as the put upon neighbour (and childminder), and Paul Shelly as the childless neighbour, Andrew were both suitably sympathetic in their performance. On the other hand Jason, I thought, was a little two-dimensional in the character of cheating husband. The only thing I didn't understand was who the builder character was supposed to be, was he a supposed to be in place of a Greek chorus?

After my initial reservations about about Ancient Greek tragedies, and after seeing this production I'd quite like to see a more classical version as well. And I'm never going to be able to listen to David Bowie's Aladdin Sane in the same way again!