When you’re all Hamletted out, it can be both refreshing and enlightening to visit Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, which retells the story from the point of view of two minor characters but in doing so adds perspective to it. Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks have pulled off a Euripidean version of this achievement: they have taken the cliché “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” at face value and told us the ancient Greek story as experienced by Medea’s two young sons.

This version is at once modern and classical: we see young Jasper and Leon engaging in horseplay in their shared bedroom (this is a Medea that rhymes with “Ikea”), but in between playing animal-naming games and teasing each other they also recount the mythological back-story of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, Medea’s crucial help and their subsequent marriage. Now the boys are locked in while Mum argues with Dad about whether they should move into “Dad’s friend”’s mansion as their parents split.

Medea is onstage for perhaps a quarter of the 60-minute running time, and doesn’t appear at all for the first 20 minutes. When she does, Emma Beattie has the intense stare of someone impassioned but cracked; when she says, “I love you. So much. And everything I do is because of that,” you both believe it unquestioningly and know with a cold certainty that she will return in a few minutes with a lethal “special drink” for the boys. There are numerous clever yet discreet allusions: Leon hugs his dad’s Aran sweater as if it were the very Golden Fleece, and a snatch of They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse In Your Soul” relates both to the Argonauts and the galaxy of luminous nightlight stars on the bedroom walls.

The original text was devised with a Sydney company in 2012, and Sarks here directs with sensitivity and fluidity. On the press night, Bobby Smalldridge and Keir Edkins-O’Brien turned in the kind of performances that any other director would give their eye teeth to get from young performers. And every bit as important as the classical tale is the portrait of simple brotherhood. Gloriously fresh, and wise far beyond its years.

Written for the Financial Times.