The impresario Nica Burns’s new West End theatre – @sohoplace – may have an insistently modern name and a “sleekly anonymous” glass exterior, said Clive Davis in The Times.
Dominic Cooke’s “subtle, brilliant” staging “takes one of the most deplorable creatures to spring from the teeming forest of monsters in ancient myth, and, without taming her, makes her feel entirely human”, said Alice Saville in The Independent.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The production is enhanced by its use of the American poet Robinson Jeffers’ “luminous” 1946 translation, which strikes a perfect balance between poetry and clarity, the mythic and the modern. It helps too that the central performances are really “sensational”, said Sam Marlowe in The Stage. Okonedo is a “towering Medea: ferociously intelligent, coolly rational, wounded and humiliated but unbroken”.
She is “magnificent”, agreed Arifa Akbar in The Guardian; her Medea is “never an outright monster” but rather a “highly strategic, stateswomanly figure” who has been deeply hurt by her experiences in this foreign land.
Daniels plays all the male roles: Jason, the unfaithful husband for whom she has sacrificed so much; Creon, the king of Corinth who banishes her; and Aegeus, to whom she runs for safety in Athens. And he is “superb” in all of them; but the scene in which Jason grieves his murdered children (a moment of violence that is all the more horrific for being heard, via a staircase leading down to the basement, but not seen) is “immense and abject”.
“Medea begins the play on her knees in supplication to the men. The drama ends in reverse, Jason brought down in the final, terrible scene.”
@sohoplace, London W1 (0330-333 5962; sohoplace.org). Until 22 April
-
Buddhist monks’ US walk for peaceUnder the Radar Crowds have turned out on the roads from California to Washington and ‘millions are finding hope in their journey’
-
American universities are losing ground to their foreign counterpartsThe Explainer While Harvard is still near the top, other colleges have slipped
-
How to navigate dating apps to find ‘the one’The Week Recommends Put an end to endless swiping and make real romantic connections
-
Catherine O'Hara: The madcap actress who sparkled on ‘SCTV’ and ‘Schitt’s Creek’Feature O'Hara cracked up audiences for more than 50 years
-
6 gorgeous homes in warm climesFeature Featuring a Spanish Revival in Tucson and Richard Neutra-designed modernist home in Los Angeles
-
Touring the vineyards of southern BoliviaThe Week Recommends Strongly reminiscent of Andalusia, these vineyards cut deep into the country’s southwest
-
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – an ‘engrossing’ exhibitionThe Week Recommends All 126 images from the American photographer’s ‘influential’ photobook have come to the UK for the first time
-
American Psycho: a ‘hypnotic’ adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis classicThe Week Recommends Rupert Goold’s musical has ‘demonic razzle dazzle’ in spades
-
Properties of the week: houses near spectacular coastal walksThe Week Recommends Featuring homes in Cornwall, Devon and Northumberland
-
Melania: an ‘ice-cold’ documentaryTalking Point The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan
-
Nouvelle Vague: ‘a film of great passion’The Week Recommends Richard Linklater’s homage to the French New Wave
