Critics commend contemporary Medea

Michael Coveney, WhatsOnStage

★★★

"Today's Almeida Medea (Kate Fleetwood) is somebody quite different, a contemporary writer tortured in her solitude, boiling with a different kind of rage entirely, whose marriage to an actor, Jason, is dust."

"This is all powerfully conveyed in Rupert Goold's production, the clipped, rapid dialogue of adaptor Rachel Cusk and, especially, the ferocious, utterly self-absorbed and uncompromising performance of Fleetwood."

"Medea's two young unnamed sons — on opening night, Lukas Rolfe and Sam Smith – are well written and confidently played."

Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph

★★★★

"I don’t think I’ve experienced a more suddenly divided reaction to a production for years. For much of Rachel Cusk’s fiercely intelligent and at times ferocious contemporary reading of Euripides’ all-powerful tragedy of female vengeance I was held in a state of rapt, agonised attention."

"Cusk has cracked it, I thought. Director Rupert Goold has delivered a knock-out final blow, I decided. And then, somehow, the closing stages of the evening let the visceral charge built up over 90 minutes dissipate."

"…just as the evening begins to reach a peak of malign energy… Cusk introduces an arty twist to the plot, and a concerted ambiguity that may well have you scratching your head. The horror of the denouement doesn’t fully strike home. She has nearly achieved a Medea for our times – she just needs to iron out the closing muddle. "

Natasha Tripney, The Stage

★★★

"[Rupert Goold] has made a version of Medea which is absolutely a play about women – or, more specifically, about women like Cusk."

"Kate Fleetwood is elemental in the title role, captivating throughout, cool and sharp as a Japanese kitchen knife but also faintly animal and fire-eyed."

"But the production is undermined by the permeating taint of privilege, of wealth, like tea seeping into paper, and it has a real impact on its potential to devastate."

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out

★★★★

"The manner in which Cusk has nakedly mined her own life to adapt this millennia-old story is utterly brazen, slightly irritating and incredibly powerful."

"Certainly it doesn’t hurt that Fleetwood is astonishingly good, a semi-feral ball of anger and confusion, with a voice that could command mountains to move."

"But ultimately Cusk is the dominant personality, rewiring Medea into a comment on the brutality of divorce and the selfishness of divorcees. She has filtered the story through the prism of her own life and it blasts out, white hot."

Ann Treneman, The Times

★★

"Euripides should sue but then, quite conveniently, he has been dead for some time and so I guess that’s not going to happen. The novelist Rachel Cusk has written what is referred to as a "new version" of Medea… It is not so much a version as a rip-out."

"Everyone is ghastly. The men are beyond irritating. The women even worse. Medea, played with all-consuming passion by Kate Fleetwood, is fury incarnate but I like that about her."

"But, and this is actually infuriating for me, Rachel Cusk has taken great care to show us in a myriad of ways how Medea is mainly a victim: of men, of power, of finance, of the lot of life where women have to give birth and make the sandwiches."

Michael Billington, The Guardian

★★★

"Reimagining the classics is fine. There is, however, a massive contradiction in Rachel Cusk’s alternately exhilarating and baffling new version of Euripides’s Medea. Cusk preserves the outward form of a drama about a woman driven to kill her own children but radically alters the climax to deny us cathartic satisfaction."

"Rupert Goold’s production is visually inventive. Ian MacNeil’s design transforms a modern duplex into a barren, blood-red landscape, the chorus are wittily played as baby-clutching mums, and Fleetwood’s Medea and Justin Salinger’s Jason conduct their mutual hostilities via their mobiles."

"But the climactic Messenger, who delivers the crucial plot information, is distractingly played as a mixture of man and woman… Sometimes, when you pour new wine into old bottles, the vessel simply explodes."

Henry Hitchings, The Evening Standard

★★★★

"Kate Fleetwood brings a chilling intensity to the title role. She can be icy, frantic or contemptuous, and relishes Cusk’s lines, which switch between aching poetry and an acidic matter-of-factness."

"The play ends in a strange and unsatisfactory fashion, dominated by Charlotte Randle’s Messenger, extraordinary yet also incongruous as she reels off rhyming couplets."

"Cusk has savage things to say about marriage, parenthood and the corrosive effects of the midlife crisis, as a fitting end to the Almeida’s season of Greek drama."

Medea runs at the Almeida until 14 November 2015.