Medea, Soho Place Theatre London
Powerhouse theatre with Sophie Okenedo and Ben Daniels, and a chorus of female servants scattered around the auditorium. Sophie Okenedo plays Medea, but this is very much Ben Daniels play as he plays everyone else — Jason, King Creon, her children’s tutor and Aegeus of Athens, smoothly jumping from one to one. Unlike Phaedra at the National Theatre, I felt that this production really got to the heart of the Greek myth but in a contemporary setting.
Knowing something of the story as soon as two cute boys appeared, I gasped ‘oh no’ — knowing something terrible would happen to them. Performed in the round, Medea hides in her house weeping as Jason has abandoned her, their children, married a younger woman (daughter of the ruling king) and now the ruling king Creon has exiled both Medea and her boys, without anything. Her old nursemaid urges her to seek protection and sanctuary with Aegeus. But as a formerly powerful princess (who has performed some bloody deeds for Jason and made enemies along the way) Medea seeks a deeper, more permanent revenge.
Feeling much like Hedwig Niemann-Raabe in her reaction to the ending of A Doll’s House, I struggle to believe in a loving mother who would deliberately kill her much loved children. Yet Sophie Okenedo made us have sympathy for Medea — she reintroduced Jason to his children, saw how much he loved them and suggested that the children take gifts to his new wife. Playing on his new wife’s youth, love of beauty and perhaps pride and vanity, she sends some heirloom jewellery along — only these have magical and murderous properties.
Our modern and rational sensibilities would have Medea move on, to reject Jason’s rejection of her, seek safety with Aegeus in Athens and live a happier, better life as a mother and woman. This Greek myth gets much more into Medea’s head through the chorus of women surrounding her — even better the actors played to the audience, we were all the watching ‘women of Athens’, the ‘commons’ and invited to think about the ethics of it all.
Medea’s revenge on Jason is truly horrible, though we never see it — the descriptions are sickening and his wife and father-in-law linger in painful suffering. Jason comes to seek murderous revenge on Medea, only to find her caked in blood, as he ends up — the blood of their sons (and she won’t let him have the bodies to bury and grieve over, they are following her to Athens).
And yet at a time when women and children were regarded as property, under the custody of their male relatives and their value and status purely dependent on and from mostly the men in their sphere of influence (husbands, brothers, uncles and fathers), this is a woman breaking free of those things, although she takes a twisted agency into her own hands. In one heart breaking moment, we see how much Medea loves her boys (and realise something of how much it must cost her to carry out this terrible act. They also show her moral and internal wrestling, as she seeks a safe place for her boys — she is being harshly exiled without anything and Jason appears to have done nothing to help her (apart from perhaps taking the boys from her, and it’s only through Medea’s intervention that he seeks to use his new wife’s influence to protect his boys from Creon). Medea has given up everything for Jason and he wasn’t worth it — what next?
More interestingly the women surrounding her act as the voice of reason, morality, voicing the thoughts swirling in Medea’s head and suggesting what will happen if she follows through with her evil intent. The ultimate ‘don’t do it!’ Even her faithful nursemaid tries to save Medea from herself and her destructive intentions by going to Aegeus herself, even when Medea won’t contemplate anything else. Even from the beginning the old nursemaid sees how tunnel visioned Medea is and gets the Tutor to hide the children from Medea’s gaze.
Ben Daniels was terrific as all the other male characters, stalking the stage in a kind of slow-motion, stylised dance (panther-like), transforming, fully defined, from one male character to another (and also stalking the stage as ‘death’ as Medea’s intentions reach their culmination). He puts on and crisply folds up each costume, moving from one person to another.
A very enthralling 90 minutes, with a transformed Medea in full cruelty, Jason in bloody despair and grief and rain falling down on the stage — the power dynamics have completely flipped, but at what cost (and was it worth it?) Some of the chorus of female servants weep as we realise what has happened to the children (which happens off stage), and the play ends with Jason collapsed in grief and sorrow. (I was relieved to see the two cute boys happily heading home post-show, very much alive).
