Medea: A Game of Two Halves, Brian.

For all the infanticide, marital strife and general gender warfare, the real tension in this Medea is whether updating the story from ancient Corinth to a contemporary housing estate can make the myth modern. Euripides' original is pretty unambiguous about Medea's power: she has real, nasty magical powers. Suburban housewives in the twenty-first century tend not to be able to conjure chariots led by dragons, and Medea's ultimate triumph does rather depend on her ability to pull off the murders and escape.

Mike Bartlett's version is faithful to the structure of the original: the central agon with Jason is preserved, as is the process of Medea from despairing, jilted wife to cunning avenger. The script is most comfortable when Medea is in full-flow: Rachael Stirling brings the right mixture of malicious rage and self-deprecating charm to Bartlett's words, building sympathy for her plight, respect for her intelligence and belief in the justice of her cause. Adam Levy, as Jason, sadly gets the worst of it: like Euripides' Jason, he is a bland, respectable and self-serving fool, easily seduced by Medea (and his future wife, Kate) and constantly wrong-footed by Medea's sharp intellect.

Despite an uninspiring opening scene - two women bitching about the closeness of their friendship to Medea, which diverts attention from the central battle between male and female into a side-bar on female rivalry - Medea successfully develops the tension: scenes between Medea and her silent son are fraught, Jason and his landlord Carter (the replacement for the original's King of Corinth) are appropriately boorish, and if Medea's seduction of Andrew (formerly King Aegeus, who offers her sanctuary, now a holiday home in Spain) is clumsy, the slow build to the climatic murders is both engaging and sinister.

Sadly, the finale destroys the good work. Opting not to find a modern alternative to the magic, Bartlett offers Medea's attack on Jason's new wife as mysterious - suddenly, after working so hard to translate Medea into a modern woman, he reverts to her as a mysterious witch. The messenger's speech - Bartlett uses the conventions well, and Amelia Lowdell rises to the monologue - is far too close to the original in both detail and spirit. At this point, all the modern trappings are cast aside.

The last speech is even worse: Medea is up on the roof, covered in blood, shouting about how her father liked hacking animals to death and her son's success in an egg and spoon race. She sets her house on fire - this is closer to the wonderful film version by Pasolini - and the police turn up. She's neither vindicated - hard readings of Euripides suggest that she is justified - nor condemned - killing children isn't a good thing. She just announces her fantasy of escape in a speech that will define theatrical bathos for the next year.



There's a real pleasure in watching the plot unfold, despite this absurd ending: Stirling nails the modern Medea, and the supporting cast are solid. There are many moments in the script of sly, dark humour and the various shifts in Medea's mood are carried off skilfully. It might simply be that there is nothing new to say about this skirmish in the war between husband and wife - certainly, children are used as weapons, but the moral is pretty unambiguous.

Until 17 October, Citizens