A Dutch company presenting an Australian version of a Greek tragedy to a British audience; if it sounds like Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Amsterdam (now renamed Internationaal Theater Amsterdam) you'd be right, although this time it's Simon Stone adapting and directing Euripides, Vera Hoogstad and Peter Van Kraaij translating his new text into Dutch and captions translating it back to English at the Barbican. One of my favourite performers from van Hove's
Roman Tragedies, Marieke Heebink leads a reinvented
Medea, a play whose basic story is a faithfully modernised version of the one Euripides told, but which in a couple of crucial details - one of them at the start, one at the end - is as major a departure from the original as Stone's version of
Yerma was. The first big difference is that, although the Medea of the original myth had a history of violence against her own family, at the opening of Euripides' version nobody has an inkling she might turn it against her husband.
