A scrupulously judicious modern-dress production
This is, incredibly, the first ever staging of Medea in the National Theatre’s 50 year history. It’s an omission all the more remarkable, given the complex feminist issues raised by Euripides’ unsparing portrayal of a dumped woman driven to exacting revenge on her treacherous partner by the ultimate (and tragically self-defeating) recourse of murdering their children.
Carrie Cracknell plugs the gap now with this horribly gripping, scrupulously judicious modern-dress production (part of the Olivier’s £15 Travelex season) in which Helen McCrory gives a performance of scorching emotional power and searching psychological acuity.
Our first view is of her two little sons lying on sleeping bags and watching TV in the dilapidated guest house – which gives onto a dark, creepy garden – in which they and their mother are camping out before banishment.
Helen McCrory’s dressing room is a grotty bedsit high up in the National Theatre. She says that, on first nights, the actors in the other bedsits rattle their windows, which sounds terrifying, as if they were all in prison and protesting against Chekhov. I reject the cage as an interview venue, so we slope onto a balcony. She looks odd in sunlight, because she is so gothic, a dark Bambi with huge eyes and a huge mouth, sitting on the body of a small, frenetic doll. Mostly she is still. Sometimes she vibrates.