The Set-up: On the surface, Medea, the woman who kills her children in order to punish her husband who has abandoned them all, seems impossible to understand. It seems equally impossible to sympathize with her. Helen McCrory's gut-wrenching performance in the National Theatre production of Medea, filmed live in September and currently in a limited run of theatrical broadcasts, allows audiences to do both.
Carrie Cracknell directs Ben Power's new version of Euripides' tragedy. Physically the production is spare. The characters are in modern dress; the stage has just a few pieces of dilapidated furniture, a sofa, a table. Just behind the family living room stands a shadowy woods. Above the woods, as if sitting on top of them, is the ballroom where Medea's husband Jason is marrying his new bride.
A group of women act as the Greek chorus; they're guests at the wedding in one scene, ghostly apparitions in another.
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