Fiona Shaw's performance in the title role is the talk of Broadway, the surest Tony Award up there. With a new translation of the venerable Euripides text by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael and a radically fresh vision of the tragedy by director Deborah Warner, this is not the majestic termagant Medea of old. The murderous mom has been transplanted to the modern world and deposited in a curiously imposing villa with a plexiglass facade. When she emerges, striding toward the family pool in sunglasses and casual wear, raging over Jason's opportunistic betrayal, Medea is besieged by a female chorus -- construed by some critics (without overpowering evidence) to be paparazzi.
If this mythic sorceress radiates less majesty, the heat of Shaw's rage is no less fearsome and scorching. She is so outraged, so bent on vengeance, she can hardly remain in her skin -- jumping and stamping madly to escape it. Does that sound oddly like childish petulance? That's the horror of it. Pampered in a plastic aura of celebrity, it's not Medea's royal dignity that's offended. It's her vanity. She cold-bloodedly murders her own children for petty spite -- because she's driven to win and come out on top at all costs. Jonathan Cake makes Jason a heroic hunk, quite the appropriate object for Medea's towering rage. What's more, Cake plays Jason's pragmatism with hardly a trace of guile, slightly slick in his charm, but matching Shaw decibel for decibel in his passion -- and sense of injury. A very human performance.
While the final murders are lurid, Warner is not fixated on shock value. At the end, Jason and Medea are poolside, drained and enervated from all their tantrums and sufferings. You almost get the idea that the whole passionate, bloody cycle could begin all over again.
