Medea review

Okonedo emerges from below like a raddled film star at a rehab clinic, wearing sunglasses and railing at the sky. She is constantly othered, as a foreigner and a woman of colour, labelled a “barbarian”, a “witch”, and a “savage”, yet she maintains her queenly poise, even as tears stream down her face. In preparation for her slaying of her two sons, fathered by the faithless, ambitious Jason, she reappears in a chic black dress, seemingly as dangerously cheerful as a party hostess who might slip arsenic into your drink.

With a mellifluous, woodwind voice, Okonedo’s Medea is implacable, merciless, bitterly witty; but we never doubt the agony that rips through her. She feels bodily defiled by Jason’s treachery; the killing of their children, the product of love and physical connection, is not just vengeful, but both brutally self-harming and purgative.

While Medea’s childhood Nurse (Marion Bailey) is a helpless ally to her mistress, three women of Corinth – a chorus of sorts – sit among the audience in the stalls, commentating, commiserating, pleading and rubber-necking. The house lights dim only as Medea’s fury intensifies, and finally turn to near-blackness for the eventual atrocity, a horror of screams and blows, thunder, lightning, rain, wailing sirens and whirling helicopter blades. Otherwise, Neil Austin’s lighting keeps us all exposed and illuminated. “Nothing is ever private in a Greek city,” remarks Okonedo’s Medea tartly, a remark sharply relevant to our own always-online society of surveillance, rumour and prurience.

The staging reverberates with such resonances: it feels at once mythic and modern. In each of her encounters with men, Medea faces down misogyny and paternalism, as Daniels shapeshifts compellingly from cocksure, swaggering Jason to oily, lascivious Corinthian king Creon and overtly camp Athenian ruler Aegeus, who offers sanctuary with strings attached. She emerges from the carnage defiant, irrevocably damaged, but cleansed. It is a sensational performance in a production of riveting acuity.