Medea review: Dominic Cooke’s staging is subtle but brilliant

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.

But the in-the-round interior, seats piled high, conjures the “aura of a classical amphitheatre”. And it is an ideal setting for this gripping new production of Medea, starring Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels. “When you are watching a play as elemental as Euripides’ study of a mother who is about to do the unthinkable – murder her children out of revenge against her errant husband, Jason – you cannot help but feel pulled into the vortex.”

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.

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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