Review: MEDEA, Gate Theatre, November 9 2015

Leon and Jasper are a couple of ordinary brothers sharing an ordinary bedroom - they play, they pretend and they look out for each other. But they're not just confined to their bedroom, well-stocked with toys though it may be, they're locked in, listening to their parents, Medea and Jason, squabbling for real as "Dad's friend" comes between them. While the younger Jasper is delighted at the prospect of moving with his father, his new home a mansion with a swimming pool, the older Leon is filled with fear and repressed anger at what is happening to his family - not without cause.

It's a bold reconfiguring of Euripdes' play by Australians Kate Mulvaney and Anne-Louise Sarks, not least as it piles the responsibility of telling the tale (and holding our attention) almost entirely on to the narrow shoulders of two boys of about 13 and 10. But Keir Edkins-O'Brien (Leon) and Bobby Smalldridge (Jasper) rise magnificently to the challenge, giving the play all its adult complexity, as seen through the eyes of children. It's a trick Stephen King pulls off in many of his novels and short stories and it's been done in film adaptations of his like "Stand By Me", but it's a big ask to do it on stage, live, for an hour with no hiding place at all. Outstanding work, lads!

If we learn secondhand of Medea's descent to murderous rage, it's no less powerful and frightening for that. Indeed, so believable are these brothers and so winningly straightforward are their analyses of couples in love and not in love, their awful fate (at the hands of their mother, played addled but perfectly sane by Emma Beattie) that the generally banal circumstances - there's talk of foreign travel and a Golden Fleece, but nothing overtly supernatural - invites even more terror, as Medea calmly offers them green "cordial" all the while professing her love of them. It's all you can do to stay in your seat and not intervene.

If Medea presented classically is distanced from our lives, or if updated and adapted (as recently at The Almeida), too often forced and fudged, this Medea is both immediate and appallingly credible. The boys believe, right until consciousness slips away for the last time, that their mother is the nurturer-provider they've always known and not using them for real as they used their popguns' pretend bullets - a way to pierce Jason's otherwise implacable confidence that he could live as he pleased. It happens. And it's always good to see voiceless victims given centre-stage in any story - especially when given voice so skilfully by these writers and the actors.

Medea continues at the Gate Theatre until 28 November.

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