Medea review, Almeida

There are moments in Rachel Cusk's modern Medea where we're scorched by the rawness of Medea's rage at being left to raise two children in penury by a husband who's got himself a hipper, richer, newer, love interest. As Jason bleats about how difficult it is keeping his young girlfriend happy, and how she doesn't really much like children, and how he's promised her his grandmother's pearl choker so could Medea please now give it back as she's no longer a member of his family, it is all any woman who recognises the situation can do not to jump on stage and strangle the scraggy apology for a male.

It's high octane stuff, but the problem with Cusk's often beautiful retelling is that you cannot reconcile a Greek tragedy in which a furious ex-wife murders her children to exact revenge on a husband who is exiling them, with a pair of Islington marrieds. In this modern setting, the Greek chorus comprises yummy mummies who mash organic carrots for their babies and hire Brazilian housekeepers to help maintain quotas in traditional New Labour territory. Medea works at her laptop writing novels and scripts and Jason's about to hit it big in a soap of some sort. Dead children: really? A lame way is found to reconcile this problem and it defuses the drama to the point there isn't any because Cusk literally loses the plot. It's like a fireworks display on a wet night - the early ones soar into the sky but by the end all you get is a splutter. 

To add insult to injury the Director, Rupert Goold, frantically attempts as we reach the non-crescendo, to reconcile the ancient and the modern through costume, choreography, and backdrops of Mount Olympus. It's a dog's breakfast of style and content. Whoever okayed the wardrobe should go to Specsavers. Thank the gods then, for Kate Fleetwood as  Medea. Fleetwood is magnificent even when standing immobile and as she's on stage all the time you can zone out the rest. 

In conclusion: Fleetwood makes a fabulous villain.  We knew this already from her glimmering Lady Macbeth in Goold's award-winning production of Macbeth, and here again, like all good villains, she shows us the character's soul, eliciting our sympathy even while we recoil (or tut in this particular production) at what we know must come.

References

Medea, Almeida Theatre, Tickets

Picture by Alastair Muir from standard.co.uk

Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, Islington, London N1.   Run ends 14 November