Deborah Warner's production for the Abbey Theatre of Euripides's Medea, translated and adapted by the late Kenneth McLeish and by Frederic Raphael, and the title role played wondrously by Fiona Shaw, won a spontaneous and sustained standing ovation from a West End audience on its opening on Shaftesbury Avenue on Tuesday night. Despite extensive re-casting (of all but Shaw's Medea and Leo Wringer's Aegeus) it is essentially the same as was seen in the Abbey last June. But it has become more assertive, less carefully understated than it was in Dublin, and Shaw's Medea has become significantly less diffident, less overtly house-wifely, than she was.
The production remains steadfastly (perhaps now with more emphatic irony) a strong feminist polemic for the 21st century while remaining true to its roots in the classic Greek tragedy of 431 BC. The chorus here is more clearly and more emphatically participative in the action, its members retaining their individuality, as was the case in the Dublin staging, and not having the problems with the sound balance that was evident in the Abbey. Siobhan McCarthy's nurse is much stronger than was Fiona Bell's in Dublin, and Jonathan Slinger's tutor is more athletically involved with Medea's two doomed children than was Garrett Keogh's. Nurse and tutor between them, in the opening scene, now create more fear and panic over what might be coming later.
Jonathan Cake's Jason is more the silver-tongued philanderer, where Patrick Kane's original Jason was the blustering male exposed in his desertion and personal ambition. But it is just as clear that this wretched man will not escape the terrible vengeance that Shaw's Medea will exact. If this reviewer preferred the overtly "domestic" diffidence evident in the Dublin performance, Shaw's remains one of the bravest, most telling, most physical and most frightening characterisations seen in some 50 years of theatre-going. It can be seen in London for the next 10 weeks and, given that the production now involves Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Group as well as Max Weitzenhoffer and Roger Berlind, both of whom have impressive New York credentials, it seems destined to create on Broadway the sensation it has already created in Dublin and London.
