Sophie Okonedo is a mythic, otherworldly Medea
Euripides’s Medea isn’t a rare commodity: there have been three major productions in London alone in the past 10 years. Even so, director Dominic Cooke, harnessing the terrific acting power of Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels, whips up a dust-dispersing chariot of an evening in the gleaming new Nimax theatre @sohoplace, hurtling us to the filicidal denouement with a force that leaves numb horror in its wake.
Last seen, theatre-wise, opposite Ralph Fiennes in Antony and Cleopatra, Okonedo brings a relatable, contemporary attitude to the wife thrown over by her partner (now hitching himself to another woman). But she mixes that with an aura of mythic, otherworldly command as anti-maternal vengeance stirs within her. That combination corresponds with American poet Robinson Jeffers’s 1946 version, which has a conversational yet rarefied quality – albeit, especially when attempted by the female chorus dotted around the auditorium, it can sound a bit stilted.
Initially homely in skirt and sandals, hair claw-gripped, Okonedo is all tear-stained vulnerability as Medea reels in incomprehension at Jason’s rejection. Exiled with her and their two boys in Corinth, he’s tying the knot with king Creon’s daughter – for pragmatic reasons, he claims. We’re a far cry from the late Helen McCrory’s baleful, combative vigour, or the flinty indomitability Diana Rigg brought to the part 30 years ago. As Okonedo navigates Vicki Mortimer’s exposed, comfortless, tiled set – literally a 360 degree performance, surrounded on all sides by the audience – she’s the plaintive embodiment of a woman with nowhere really left to turn.
The isolating mise en scene underlines the fact that she only has her own resources and wiles to draw on. And that bare-bones self-reliance is answered by the way a protean Daniels takes all the male roles. Orbiting the outer rim of the stage with a slow-motion precision, in step with a quiet tom-tom beat – picking up, donning and discarding clothing as he goes – he breaks into successive scenes in different trappings of masculinity: Creon and Aegeus as well as Jason. There’s a feminist slant here – it’s as if he morphs from prowling warder into yet another variant of the patriarchy. But it’s also as if we’re co-opted into Medea’s driven-deranged perspective, that all men are equally untrustworthy.
At what point does she lose the plot, and our sympathy? There’s no getting away from the monstrosity of her deed, the butchery of her innocents happening below-stairs yet heart-rendingly audible. As with Cooke’s recent staging of CP Taylor’s Good, in which an ordinary German man gradually Nazifies, the point of no-return is imperceptibly passed, the overall effect violently abrupt.
One moment Medea is estranged but restrained, bickering back to back with the father of her children. The next, amid ominous lightning and rain-fall, she’s standing bloody-handed and defiantly staring. Daniels’s muscular action-man is flung from complacent self-possession to the essence of an emotional wreck, slumped in devastation. It’s bleak stuff for late winter – but such palpable intensity is apt to put a spring in your step.
Until April 22. Tickets: 0330 333 5962; sohoplace.org
