By the Bog of Cats, Wyndhams Theatre, London

Hunter needs the real Medea, not this imitation

This is not the first time that Holly Hunter has acted in By The Bog Of Cats - she appeared in an earlier staging in San Jose. Evidently, the Hollywood star sees something in Marina Carr's play that eludes this reviewer.

This is not the first time that Holly Hunter has acted in By The Bog Of Cats - she appeared in an earlier staging in San Jose. Evidently, the Hollywood star sees something in Marina Carr's play that eludes this reviewer.

Transplanting Greek tragedy to the dark bogs of the Irish midlands, the piece now receives its British premiere in a powerfully cast and poetically well-gauged production by Dominic Cooke. Hunter takes the central role of Hester Swane, a contemporary version of Medea, the heroine whose emotional anguish at being spurned drives her to the terrible, self-destructive revenge of infanticide.

We discover our heroine putting up doughty resistance to being evicted from her home by Carthage Kilbride (Gordon MacDonald), the man with whom she has been living for the past 14 years. He is the father of her seven-year-old daughter (a superbly convincing Kate Costello) and an ex-lover to whom she still feels a fierce, almost elemental, attachment.

But Carthage is about to make an advantageous marriage to a landowner's heiress and wants rid of the disreputable Hester. Today is his wedding day and something tells you that it is not going to end in laughter.

I wish I could say that I was able to take the resulting play seriously. But this, alas, is not Greek drama brought up to date; it is high-class hokum hoping to gain some tragic glamour by association. I found it hard to keep a straight face from the moment when Hester first appeared dragging on the corpse of a black swan.

A blind cat-woman tells her of the auld prediction that she won't long outlive that creature, a doom-laden cliché that reminded me of the John Guare spoof: "I don't know much about symbols, but I'd say that when frozen flamingos fall out of the sky, good times are not in store."

As if that is not enough to convince us that Hester would be well advised to cancel the milk, there's a funereally-garbed "ghost-fancier" on hand who informs her that he will be back at dusk.

Hunter lets rip with an explosive display of scalding scorn and furiously embattled spirit. She's undoubtedly impressive, even if her performance seems a little constrained by the effort of keeping up a thick but approximate Irish brogue that sometimes sounds like a strong contender for this year's Dick Van Dyck Award.

What is disappointing is not Hunter's portrayal, but Carr's sentimentalised make-over of the Medea character. The great shaping event in the life of this heroine was, we learn, abandonment by her mother at the age of seven.

So here, it is less the desire for revenge against her former lover than fear that her daughter will suffer the same pangs of loss without her that pushes Hester to slit the poor child's throat. She even manages to have conciliatory woman-to-woman with Carthage's new bride. The moral ambivalence and the savagery of the original are lachrymosely diluted. It is in Euripides' great tragedy that one would like to see Hunter.