Medea 

The National Theatre, London 

4/5

THE National Theatre’s Medea is startling. It offers its audience a frighteningly intense performance from Helen McCrory and forces “you who watch” to confront what it means to observe the bloody vengeance of a woman cruelly abandoned by her husband.  

At the heart of this production is McCrory’s Medea and she is a complicated and contradictory entity, literally vibrating with intensity. 

At times, she is funny, the audience laughs at her flippant and sarcastic comments, making her pain relatable and so her crimes even harder to stomach. But we never believe these crimes are undertaken lightly, or wildly, with McCrory showing us the pain, the rage and the despair that lead to her decision.   

McCrory’s Medea is an isolated one, no other character operates at this level of intensity. 

The support she receives from the childless Aegeus (played gracefully by Dominic Rowan) is a palpable relief, but his presence is fleeting. 

The Chorus, in their often effective dance sequences, offer some uncontrolled, twitching movements that strike a similar note to McCrory, but again the similarity is transitory, much like their validation of her revenge.  

Nowhere is Medea more isolated than in the moments after the killing, when we feel the weight of the act in the flatness of her speech. 

In Carrie Cracknell’s production there is no godly chariot to take Medea and the bodies of her children away. 

Instead, McCrory struggles off alone, staggering under the weight of bodies cocooned in blood-stained sleeping bags. 

Despite this lack of the divine, Cracknell’s production is a layered one and Tom Scutt’s design draws our attention to the layering of different worlds. 

Much of the action plays out in a sparse living room, but behind this is a garden. 

It is an other-worldly, smoked-filled space, full of twisted trees and seemingly fading into nothingness. McCrory’s Medea prowls on the border between this domestic space and this ethereal one.   

Cracknell’s production is also about watching. As we enter the boys are watching television, we are introduced to the plot by Michaela Coel’s haunted Nurse who watches it unfold, we watch Jason’s wedding and we watch new bride Kreusa burn in her poisoned dress. 

The Chorus watch Medea until the moment she is about to murder her children.  

But the only crime to happen offstage in this effective and passionate production is Medea’s filicide.  

KATHERINE M GRAHAM 

Runs until September 4. Box office (020) 7452 3000