Medea

Half a century ago, Tom Stoppard wrote ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’; now Belvoir Theatre brings us a riff on Euripides’s tragedy ‘Medea’ that might have been called ‘Jasper and Leon Have Been Sent To Their Room’.

Writers Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks have changed the children’s names from the original. So here, instead of Mermeros and Pheres we have little Jasper (Bobby Smalldridge) and older Leon (Keir Edkinds-O’Brien), Medea’s children whom – 2,500-year-old spoiler alert – she murders in order to take revenge upon her neglectful husband Jason.

This ‘Medea’ is the story told from their perspective, and in its own way has a fair bit in common with Stoppard’s smash: two cheerful male characters who play a minor role in a famous play, trapped in limbo (their mum has locked them into the bedroom), occupying themselves with nonsense (mostly playing with their toys and having childish arguments), unable to escape a pre-ordained fate for which they are blameless.

In spirit, though, it is, until the end, a sweet study of boyhood that often feels entirely divorced from the story it’s yoked to. You can read something or other into the fact the boys are playing with toy guns for much of it, but really it’s a sprightly, often funny celebration of children’s ability to detach themselves from reality. The boys’ tragedy and triumph is that they never know what’s going on, even if the occasional appearances of their mother (a fragile Emma Beattie) begin to unnerve them.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t entirely get behind what felt like the myth’s eventual intrusion. Some of the references – particularly to the poisoned dress Medea gives to Jason’s new lover – seem borderline arch, while the abrupt pitch into ancient darkness at the climax doesn’t gel with the modern setting.

Much as this ‘Medea’ approaches things completely differently to Rachel Cusk’s recent Almeida version, Cusk successfully modernised the story wholesale. Here, Mulvany and Sarks’s insistance on keeping the Greek fundamentals feelings more like cruel whimsy than affecting tragedy: the boys die because that’s what happens in the original ‘Medea’, not because their murders feel like a credible outcome to this particular play.

Still the child leads – who alternate with another two boys on different nights – are fantastic, and Sarks’s production burns brilliantly, until an ancient myth comes to snuff them out.