Theatre review: Medea

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.

But Heebink's Anna starts the play being released from a mental hospital. A talented doctor and medical researcher, when she discovered her husband was cheating on her she slowly and methodically started poisoning his food.

She was caught and sectioned before it was too late, and has now been released with a cocktail of drugs to keep her stable; but she labours under the misapprehension that her family will now get back together, and her husband Lucas (Aus Greidanus jr.) has already got a new flat for himself and girlfriend Clara (Eva Heijnen.) He also has full custody of their teenage sons Edgar (Faas Jonkers) and Gijs (Poema Kitseroo,) but allows them to spend a lot of time at their mother's house in the hope it'll help rebuild a routine they've lost. Unable to see that her attempted murder ended their marriage more conclusively than his infidelity ever could, Anna thinks forgiving Lucas will bring him back too.

Stone's Medea isn't the story of a woman reacting to her husband's infidelity; it's about her reaction to the fact that the world she's returned to isn't the one she thought it would be. The creatives may be different but the look of Bob Cousins' set is a familiar vast, stark white room (not that I don't like this aesthetic but don't audiences in Amerstam ever get bored of it?) The conceit of the precocious boys making a documentary about their home life with their new video camera gives us huge, unforgiving closeups of Heebink's face as the scales fall from her eyes and those around her miss the signs of just how much she's relapsing. The piece premiered in 2014 and presumably the script hasn't been tweaked since, as the boys' obsession with The Sopranos and a reference to James Gandolfini's "recent" death feel a bit dated, but as ashes fall like snow and the tensions mounts I found little to really fault with the adaptation - until the very end.

I guess a SPOILER ALERT is needed in case the show is revived (the Barbican seems to have been its final run for now) but while I'm pretty open to loose adaptations, Stone's version makes a change at the end that, for me, makes this no longer a Medea story, or at the very least not Euripides' Medea: It's not as bizarre as forgetting to kill the kids, but when Anna kills Edgar and Gijs she also kills herself; she also leaves Lucas a voicemail about how she and the boys will be waiting for him. This murder-suicide twist, and the fact that she apparently believes in an afterlife together, takes out the essential horror of the story: I've seen her motivations and situation explored in different ways, but what it always comes down to is Medea not only causing Jason a devastating loss, but also living with that loss herself. Anna's scorched-earth approach to Lucas' life, on the other hand, takes herself out of the story as well, and while this is a devastating, intense evening, I was left thinking it avoided asking itself the story's biggest question.

Medea by Euripides in a version by Simon Stone, translated by Vera Hoogstad and Peter Van Kraaij, is booking until the 9th of March at the Barbican Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Sanne Peper.