Medea, National Theatre Live REVIEW 19 Feb 2024 ***** (5)

THEATRE

Medea adapted by Ben Power from Euripides

At  National Theatreat Home Collection - online

https://www.ntathome.com/videos/medea-full-play

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars:***** (5)

This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly on 3MBS on Sat 24 Feb 2024. KH

Helen McCrory in Medea -image supplied

 If you want to see a genuinely inspired performance in an exceptional production, you must see Helen McCrory in Medea by National Theatre. It is available to rent on NT Live website.

 

McCrory has left this mortal coil now, but her remarkable work lives on in this, and other filmed productions.

 

Medea has been rejected and abandoned by Jason, played with cool cruelty by Danny Sapani, her one great love for whom she betrayed her family. He is to marry a young princess and Medea is banished from Athens by the King (Dominic Rowan), while Jason demands that she leave her two young sons behind with him.

 

She pleads for, and is granted, one day’s grace before her exile. During these few hours, Medea, In her grief and rage and bitter desire for revenge, poisons the princess and murders her own sons to exact her vengeance on Jason.

 

Her Medea is passionate, compelling, volatile, complex, sympathetic and, ultimately, doomed. McCrory embodies the grief, ferocity and potent sense of betrayal of this spurned woman, plumbing the depths of despair, devotion and fierce violent jealousy.

 

Carrie Cracknell’s direction is deft, inventive and polished. McCrory commands the stage but she is surrounded by a chorus that dances and sings her story and her fate.

 

Michaela Coel’s Nurse is Medea’s champion and narrator of her achingly painful journey from queen, to deserted lover then murderer. Her emotional telling of the story foreshadows the horrors of its ending.

 

There is more – much more – to tell, but you must see this production to feel its potency, its clawing pain and its flawed and shattered heroine.

 

By: Kate Herbert.

 

Helen McCrory in Medea -image from video on website