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Medea

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Four stars

 

The sun may be shining at the start of Kathy McKean’s devastating version of Euripides’ tragedy, but it doesn’t last in this revival of Bard in the Botanics production, originally seen in 2022 in the up-close confines of the Kibble Palace. This tour of more formal theatres unleashes the full fury of McKean and Euripides’ heroine whilst retaining the play’s sense of intimacy amidst the emotional fallout.

 

Under lighting designer Benny Goodman’s Mediterranean skies hanging over the mix of the monumental and the domestic on Carys Hobbs’ set, Isabelle Joss’s Nurse picks up the pieces of the break up of her mistress and her former squeeze Jason, who is about to wed a younger and more local model. When Medea finally swishes and simmers into view, despite her anguished noises off, she is a sunkissed vision about to explode into gold coloured flames.

 

What follows in Gordon Barr’s production is an extraordinary depiction of a woman left holding her babies who is driven to take the most extreme form of revenge. McKean brings this to life with a text laced with poetry and drama, but which still channels the everyday mundanities of sudden single motherhood on the emotional cliff edge navigated by Medea.

 

At the centre of this in the title role is a fearless Nicole Cooper, who strides to her fate with an uncompromising and combative air even as her heart is about to break once more. Woe betide anyone who gets in her way, even if he is the king. Cooper runs the full gamut of emotions, from anger to heartbreak and whatever comes next when she humbles herself before Alan Steele’s Creon before appearing to rekindle the love she once shared with Johnny Panchard’s Jason.

 

More than anything in Cooper’s utterly committed performance, we see the complexities of being a mother who, for all she loves her children, knows their loss is the only thing that can destroy Jason. In doing so, however, she must also destroy herself. Most heartrending of all is when Cooper folds her infants’ coats on the floor, hanging both them and herself out to dry. In what remains an earth shattering portrait of a woman taking back control of herself as much as anything else, the consequences of her actions are destined to live with her forever.


The Herald, March 9th 2026

 

ends

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