Rachel Cusk is known for being an unsparing writer in the territory of marital break-up. Her memoir Aftermath is relentless, and in her modern-day adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, Medea’s vitriolic recrimination of herself as well as others, speaking of “dismantling” the children, shows more than mere echoes of Cusk’s own musings: here, Medea is also a writer, Jason an actor who deserts her in favour of, literally, a younger model. It  is a good match of adapter and material: the contemporary problem is always that of showing Medea as thoughtlessly abused and cast aside by her husband and his allies, yet without mitigating her own murderous revenge.

In particular, Cusk deals sharply with the ending, which rankles with modern sensibilities in that Medea is whisked off by the gods to save her from retribution for her murders. Here, she writes a deliberately annoying penultimate sequence, in which a messenger of the gods delivers a trite piece of happy-ending doggerel even as Kate Fleetwood’s Medea seems to be filling in her sons’ graves. It is purposely nonsensical, and is followed by a grim real-world scene in which we are directly told that this is a world without gods altogether. Consequently, all that junk about Medea’s vindication is revealed for what it is, while she and Jason are left to deal with the reality in which their marriage is ruined, they are both terminally embittered and their young sons have attempted suicide. Euripides dared to question the gods’ whimsical conduct; Cusk ridicules the very idea of their existence.

Fleetwood has that forbidding edge which makes her likewise perfect casting for director Rupert Goold in the final instalment of the Almeida’s “Greeks” season. (She is also Goold’s wife… oof, imagine the breakfast-table conversations during this gig!) She gives herself no quarter, and is strongly supported by Justin Salinger as a Jason scarcely more compos mentis than she is herself, Michele Austin as a philosophical Brazilian cleaner and a chorus of middle-class nursing mothers. The poster image shows Fleetwood’s Medea with her hand in a smoothie-maker, as if about to purée herself. That about sums matters up.

Written for the Financial Times.