Medea review: Sophie Okonedo has a moving dignity in this triumphant production

Dominic Cooke’s subtle staging of this Greek myth makes Medea’s actions seem just about understandable

Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels in Medea (Johan Persson)

In Greece, the spurned outsider Medea tells us, women are good for nothing except birthing children – so she’s chosen evil instead. Dominic Cooke’s subtle, brilliant staging of the Euripides tragedy takes one of the most deplorable creatures to spring from the teeming forest of monsters in ancient myth, and, without taming her, makes her feel entirely human.

Sophie Okonedo plays Medea with a moving dignity that nearly masks her deep inner pain. First, there is the damage caused by leaving behind her native country, where her healing powers are celebrated, in favour of one where she’s feared as a sorceress. Then the compounding injury of being left for a golden-haired princess, abandoned by the husband she’d given up everything for. Her revenge is meticulously project-managed to cause maximum harm: she’s lost her conscience, along with everything else.

Over at the National Theatre, another Euripides play is being enjoyably dismantled by Simon Stone, its parts reconstituted into a modern drama about middle-class hypocrisy and post-colonial struggles, framed in a slick glass box. Cooke’s approach is entirely different. He uses Robinson Jeffers’ luminous 1946 translation, one that strikes a perfect balance between poetry and clarity, and rescues it from the threat of pretentiousness by bringing out every ounce of humour in its lines.

However naffly glitzy the exterior of newish Tottenham Court Road theatre @sohoplace might be, its in-the-round interior makes for an entirely successful amphitheatre for this unfolding drama. Vicki Mortimer’s set creates a central stone oval that gestures to ancient theatres, while still providing the near-obligatory rain that must accompany moments of high emotional trauma in 21st-century performance venues.

It’s a space that’s so intimate you can see the whites of each audience member’s eyes as Medea’s bloody revenge blossoms like ink in water. The most striking innovation of Cooke’s production is to make the audience part of its chorus of Greek women: the women of Corinth (Jo McInnes, Amy Trigg and Penny Layden) sit among us, and Okonedo continually looks to us, daring us to be horrified, or teasing us for our prurience by comparing us to shoppers avidly examining her deeds like they’re rolls of cloth at the market.

Ben Daniels plays all of Medea’s men here, giving Creon, Jason and Aegeus totally distinct qualities – but he silently strikes surreal, heroic poses between his appearances, suggesting a kind of universal masculinity that’s entirely out of step with Medea’s darkly feminine world. His Aegeus is deeply camp and hilariously contemporary, dealing with Medea’s evil schemes with an oblivious ordinariness, like they’re chatting about selling a used car.

Medea’s eventual revenge is horrendous: I found myself wanting to block my ears to the descriptions of her rival’s death, even as Okonedo’s lip curled in the minutest possible display of satisfaction. But the triumph of Cooke’s production is that her actions feel just about understandable: an extreme reaction to the extreme pressures she’s been subjected to in this brutal, ancient society.

‘Medea’ is at @sohoplace until 22 April