Medea

01 October, 2015

11 SEPTEMBER

INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI

When the screening of the British theatre director Carrie Cracknell’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea came to an end, there was hardly any applause. Cracknell significantly altered the original ending, and this left most viewers unamused. But much remained as in Euripides’s text: the iteration of the pain of “us women,” and the recurrent theme of the anxieties of childbirth. Helen McCrory was remarkable as Medea, particularly in the murder sequences, where she moved from an absolute absence of emotion to an overwhelming excess of it. This, however, wasn’t enough to salvage Cracknell’s adaptation, which relied too heavily on McCrory’s rather physical performance of pain but failed to convey some of the nuance of the classic script.

- Gayas Eapen