I couldn’t help but think of Guode during Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s Medea, rewritten and directed by Australian wunderkind Simon Stone, and live-streamed to Her Majesty’s Theatre for one night only as part of the Adelaide Festival. Equally, it seems, Stone couldn’t help but think of another ‘rare and dreadful case’ (to use Garner’s phrase) of female filicide – that of American woman Debora Green, who in 1995 murdered her two children in a house fire. Stone’s version, first produced by Ivo van Hove’s Amsterdam-based company in 2014, draws heavily on the facts of the Green case, stripping Euripides’ already-lean play to its essence and thrusting it into a ringingly contemporary context.

Like Green, Stone’s Medea (renamed Anna) is a physician with two children, Edgar and Gijs. Estranged from her husband, Lucas (whom, in another detail cribbed from Green’s life, she had been poisoning with ricin), Anna is a woman dangerously adrift, let go by the pharmaceutical company where she had worked and first met Lucas, and resentful of her husband’s new relationship with the much younger Clara. Her rage, perhaps worsened by a year-long spell in a mental institution, has begun to sharpen into something frighteningly implacable.

The cast of Medea (San Peper/Adelaide Festival)

Yet Anna is closer, in a way, to Garner’s account of Medea than the student’s. She is not simply mad, a mother deranged to the point of abrogating even the most basic forms of parental care, but a woman pushed to a cold-blooded crime by the weight of her circumstances. ‘I’m not easily intimidated,’ she says at one point. Speaking, I suspect, for many women, she lambasts Lucas – an archetypal mediocre white man – for his failure to acknowledge her decisive impact on his career. Tellingly, he doesn’t disagree.    

As with Stone’s Thyestes, which played at the Adelaide Festival in 2018, Medea takes place within a bare, largely enclosed white space (the designer is fellow Australian Bob Cousins). A column of small black fragments drifts onto the stage, forming an ominously ash-like pile. A large screen above the stage slides in and out of view to display captions indicating time-shifts of weeks and days, and also live video as ‘recorded’ by Edgar (Sonny van Utteren) and Gijs (Titus Theunissen) for their home movies. (The multi-camera livestream makes effective use of the work’s extant video design, including impressive overhead shots.) Stefan Gregory’s sound design, incorporating low electronic drones that register almost subliminally, is suitably unnerving.     

As with Thyestes, Stone’s dialogue – performed in Dutch with English subtitles – is disarmingly demotic and blackly funny. Uneasy laughter ripples around at least half the theatre as Herbert (Alexander Elmecky), a bookshop owner Anna has started working for, tells the story of a woman who, annoyed by her husband’s inability to direct his piss into the toilet bowl, severs his penis and throws it into the street.

Marieke Heebink as Anna in Medea (Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival)

This is a powerful rather than perfect version of Euripides’ play. However effective Stone may be at ratcheting up tension, he can’t resist swapping out the drama he carefully builds across the first hour or so for the histrionics that dominate the latter part of the evening. Marieke Heebink and Aus Greidanus Jr, otherwise superb as Anna and Lucas, are reduced to a lot of Shouty Acting. Even the pile of ‘ash’ seems to exhaust itself as a symbol, ending up being tossed around the stage like snow as if Stone can’t quite work out what to do with it.                  

Also perplexing is why Stone, in an adaptation as spare as this, decided to include three characters – Herbert, as well as social worker Marie-Louise (Joy Delima) and Christopher (Bart Slegers), Lucas’s boss and also Clara’s father – that are dramaturgically superfluous. I left wondering if the play might have worked better as a two-hander, especially given that Clara (Eva Heijnen) seems decidedly underwritten compared to Anna. Similarly, the roles of the children are ciphers more than anything. Their presences ought to make us empathise more with their tragic fate, but they don’t because we never really get to know them.     

Adelaide Festival directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy tried to bring Stone’s Medea to the Festival once before in the form of the Brooklyn production, which starred Rose Byrne and husband Bobby Cannavale. While on this occasion Adelaide audiences had to settle for a (not always technically smooth) livestream of a different production, the timing undoubtedly casts Stone’s treatment of Euripides’ play in a new light. As successive sexual assault scandals engulf the national parliament, sparking a wider conversation about the sexist and misogynist abuse of women, Stone’s reframing of Medea as a woman deranged less by individual pathology than by patriarchal society is all the more trenchant. A mother, yes, but badly treated. Betrayed.

Medea was performed on 4 March 2021 at Her Majesty’s Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival.