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Medea
Soho Place Theatre    Spring 2023

Victims of injustice don’t always accept their treatment. Even the most abused and controlled women can hit back at the men who have inflicted misery on their lives.

The adaptation of Euripides’ play Medea by Robinson Jeffers, here directed by Dominic Cooke, emphasises the extent to which Medea is wronged by the State, by Jason and by other men in Corinth.

The performance opens with the actor Ben Daniels, who plays all the male characters in the play, arriving to the central circular space and roughly clearing the table and chairs away

Later as Jason he will ask Medea to remove herself from Corinth, explaining that he will look after their two children now he has taken up with the daughter of Creon, the ruler of Corinth.

Creon is even more determined to get rid of her, ordering her to leave the area immediately.

The tearful distressed Medea, given a sensitive measured performance by Sophie Okonedo, describes herself as 'a foreigner, despised, alone.'

She recalls she 'was a child of power but I spent it for Jason, betrayed my father, killed my brother. I want simply to die.'

One of the chorus of women scattered among the audience claims that 'a city where a woman suffers injustice is not well ruled.' Medea tells these women they can 'share my wandering ocean of beggary.'

As the women speak, Ben Daniels prowls in slow motion about the performance space, emphasising the containment they endure.

This is an engaging naturalistic performance in which the actors, particularly the impressive Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels, speak their lines in a way that follows the meaning of the words.

There is such a sympathetic depiction of Medea in this production that, despite the horrific cruelty she will inflict on others, the audience cannot but recognise the responsibility of those who rule Corinth.

Review of Medea - Soho Place Theatre 2023