Deborah Warner is nothing if not daring, and she has directed for the National Theatre a version of Medea which comes across as a legitimate feminist polemic without ever losing its power as a classic tragedy.
Even as Medea plots the goriest and most total destruction of everything that matters to her husband, Jason, she is fondling her children's toys, speaking diffidently, almost apologetically, of the murderous mayhem she is to commit in vengeance for his desertion of her and their two sons.
This has the effect of rendering the text domestically: it may well be a Greek tragedy with gods and kings and choruses, but it carries clear resonances for any loving wife betrayed by an uncaring husband and consumed by a desire for revenge. It may be 431 AD, but could as well be the year 2000.
The chorus of women (carefully individualistic in its movements about the stage) starts out in sympathy with her condition, but dissident voices rise up one at a time as they realise the horrific degree of her inexorable intent. But we know from the setting of the lethal props by the children's fearful nurse at the start that Medea will not be deterred from her dreadful purpose. We must suffer with the chorus, emotions divided until the catharsis (even if, in this version, old grand-dad Helios does not come to carry her off in his sun-chariot to Athens where the foolish Aegeus has promised her asylum).
The text, by Kenneth McLeish and "Volatic Ltd" (could that be Frederic Raphael?), is crisp, ironic and telling - even if some of its clarity is lost by the less well-projected voices in the peculiar acoustic of the Abbey stage stripped bare of cloth (save for Tom Rand's carefully contemporary casual costumes) by Tom Pye's austere and unforgiving setting.
Some of Fiona Bell's soft Scottish burr as the nurse was lost to this problem, as were several of the chorus voices from time to time. Garrett Keogh's tutor was suitably solicitous of his charges, Barry McGovern's Kreon tetchily solicitous of the best interests of his daughter and his kingdom. Leo Wringer's Aegeus fell easily and elegantly to Medea's determined spell, and Padraig Denihan's messenger declaimed valiantly (over an intrusive Irish lament) the terrible tale of the outcome of Medea's machinations.
But this, above all of Euripides's tragedies, is a play of two people: Jason and Medea. Patrick O'Kane's Jason has all the bluster and rationalisation of the man who has done wrong and cannot admit it lest it dent his chauvinism or his male arrogance. Fiona Shaw's Medea manages always and with huge skill to maintain the domestic niceties without once allowing herself to veer from her vengeful purpose, most searing, perhaps, when she seems most diffident and always hypnotically frightening in her intent. This is a complex and major dramatic characterisation, not to be missed by any who care about great acting.
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