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 The adaptation, which had its press night at Britain's
National Theater on Monday, sets the scene as the audience
enters to see Medea's two young, doomed sons lying in sleeping
bags on stage, watching television under the watchful eye of
their nurse.
On a floor above them is a room with a banquet table set with a
wedding cake, Their father, Jason, played by Danny Sapani, will
marry Kreusa, the young daughter of King Kreon of Corinth in a
nuptial that has fired Jason's first wife into a vengeful rage.
At the back of the set is a primeval forest that could serve
double duty for the witches from "Macbeth" and where Medea howls
her curses and will later kill her sons.
The nurse, played by Michaela Coel, is the Cassandra of the
evening, who in her prologue says there is only one way the play
can end - and returns at the conclusion to say, in effect,
"Well, I told you so."
McCrory, reprising in some ways her Narcissa Malfoy witch from
the Potter films, but also deploying the charm of former British
Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, whom she portrayed
twice on screen, throws her all into the role of the spurned
wife who gets revenge by killing her own children.
"I might be choked with misery, famished by grief but there is
still life in me," Medea wails, before unearthing a sack
containing a poisoned garment for Kreusa to wear, and a dagger
to kill her sons. "I'm not finished. There's trouble come to the
house of Kreon."
McCrory, all winsomeness and guile one minute, and spitting
poison the next, is hardly off stage for a minute of the
90-minute production, directed by Carrie Cracknell, whose
staging of "Blurred Lines" about rape culture was a hit for the
National last year.
The adaptation, by the National associate director Ben Power,
updates the language to modern idiom but dispenses with some of
the nuances of other versions.
He pares the role of King Kreon, played by Martin Turner, who as
a result gives in a bit too easily to Medea's plea to stay an
extra day before being banished from Corinth.
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 In one of several of Power's updatings that drew laughs from
the audience, Medea reassures the nurse who has seen her
kowtowing to Kreon that she has not suddenly gone soft.
"Do you honestly believe I would kneel and weep in front of a
man like that except to get my own way?"
That extra day will prove to be the undoing of everyone.
Jason, the same one from mythology whom Medea helped to steal
the Golden Fleece from her own father in far-away Colchis, is
the perfect male hypocrite. "It seems I must defend myself," he
says. "I married, I made you happy, I civilized you - you were
nothing when I found you."
"We are strangers here ... we would have starved ... I can keep
you and our family safe."
But essentially this is a play about women driven to the extreme of
what the text says only one woman has ever done before, which is to
kill her own children.
The women of Corinth are the Greek chorus, questioning Medea about
her intentions and asking how she could do such a thing. They also
perform twitchy dances to the Goldfrapp score suggestive of the
pressures on women who, as Medea says, must split in two to give
birth. She says she would rather go into battle like a man than ever
do it again.
In the end Medea overcomes her love for her children, and for Jason,
to provide him and his by-then dead bride, who has been reduced to a
heap of bones by the poisoned robe, with the wedding day from Hell.
The audience, though, gets a great 90 minutes of theater.
(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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