MEDEA

A fresh interpretation of passion, love and vengeance

‘Wow, I’d do anything for that kitchen!’ whispered the woman behind me. Medea’s red-brick terraced house somewhere in the Home Counties opens up like a doll’s house to reveal her blindingly shiny blood-red kitchen. Personally, I coveted her knife collection. But more of that later.

There is nothing remote or mythical about Mike Bartlett’s new version of Euripides’s epic Greek tragedy, Medea. He’s made it a ferociously intense and intimate play for today. Not that this terrible story of a spouse’s savage and vengeful jealousy has ever gone out of date. Remember Lorena Bobbit, the wife who chopped off her straying husband’s wedding tackle?

He’s also pulled off something rather remarkable in making this production, which he himself directs for the Glasgow Citizens Theatre and Rupert Goold’s Headlong Theatre Company often pitilessly funny.

He has cast Rachel Stirling, the daughter of Diana Rigg, a celebrated if rather more traditional Medea, in the role of this woman, derailed by grief. She’s scarcely left the house since her husband Jason abandoned her for a younger model, the 19-year-old daughter of her despised landlord. Medea has always felt something of an outsider. She’s much posher than her neighbours, all of whom seem to have grown up together. And, she’s a crashing snob who is hard to help. Kind Sarah from next door drops little Tom back from school every day but she never comes downstairs to say thank you. Traumatised Tom hasn’t spoken since his dad left. He is addicted to his computer games, all shooting and violence, lost to the world.

When Medea does appear, her scarlet hair unbrushed, eyes red-rimmed, she is all fire, fury and desperation. ‘I’m supposed to rise above it. I know. Be strong. But – I’d rather be a man. I’d rather be a man who gets sent to war, is shot at, and starved and raped and maimed, than be a woman…’

And once her blood is up, she can’t stop: ‘I’d be good in a war. The way I feel at this moment, put me on a battlefield and I’d massacre the lot of them…’

In a particularly shocking, wordless scene, she chops carrots for Tom’s supper. The blade glints terrifyingly. Then she plunges her hand into the saucepan of boiling water. This is the act of a woman who wants to exchange the unbearable hurt in her heart for something manageable and physical. Not crazy, but absolutely crazed. Which makes all the difference in the world and makes her performance outstanding.

Until 1 December. For tour dates: 020-7478 0270, www.headlongtheatre.co.uk