The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

be a line from Sophocles.)

And indeed, rather than being what Shaw called ‘very normal’ and Warner referred to as ‘the happy housewife of Corinth’, Euripides’ Medea is deliberately presented as a kind of female reincarnation of one of the most anguished, outsized, titanic dramatic heroes in the ancient canon: Sophocles’ Ajax, the hero of a drama first produced about ten years before Medea. Like Ajax, Medea is first heard, rather uncannily, offstage, groaning over her plight: her abandonment by her husband Jason, who has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. She is characterized by what the classicist Bernard Knox, writing at Ajax, has summarized as ‘determined resolve, expressed in uncompromising terms’, by a ‘fearful, terrible … wild’ nature, by ‘passionate intensity’. Like many Sophoclean heroes, she is motivated above all by an outraged sense of having been treated with disrespect, and curses her enemies while she plans her revenge; like Ajax specifically, she is tormented above all by the thought that her enemies will laugh at her.

So ‘strong, wilful, and witchy’ is, in fact, precisely what Euripides’ Medea is. But not Warner’s Medea, who appears to be stranded somewhere between Sylvia Plath and Mia Farrow – a frazzled woman who can’t figure out how to act until the last minute. (Euripides’ Medea can: from the start, she keeps repeating the terrifying word ktenô, ‘I will kill.’) Shaw, an impressive actress, chews up the scenery doing an impersonation of a housewife gone amok. When she comes out on the rather bleak stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre – apart from a door upstage centre, there are just some cinder blocks strewn around covered with tarps, as if a construction project had been halted midway, and a swimming pool (by now de rigueur in contemporary stagings of classical texts; there was one in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, too) in the centre with a toy boat floating in it – she’s emaciated, hugging herself, haggard, nervously cracking jokes. (She draws a little witch hat in the air above her head at one point.) To reconcile this Valium-starved wreck with the text’s many references to Medea’s fame, power, and semi-divine status, Warner makes some halfhearted references to Medea as being some kind of ‘celebrity’: the chorus, here, is a gang of autograph-seeking groupies – ‘the people who stand outside the Oscars’, as Warner put it. The intention, you imagine, is to throw into the interpretative stew some kind of commentary on ‘celebrity’, but it’s a stupid point to be making: all the heroes of Greek tragedy are famous.

      This scaled-down, ‘normal’ Medea makes nonsense of the text in other, more damaging ways. Everyone in Euripides’ play who interacts with Medea shows a healthy respect for the woman they know to be capable of terrible deeds. (She once gave the daughters of one of Jason’s enemies a deliberately misleading recipe for rejuvenating their ageing father, which involved cutting the old man into tiny pieces. Needless to say, it didn’t work. This was the subject of Euripides’ first drama, produced in 455 BC, when he was thirty.) She is august, terrifying; the granddaughter of the sun, for heaven’s sake. The Warner/Shaw Medea looks as if she can barely get herself out of bed in the morning, and the result is that when the plot does require her to do those awful things (the murder of Jason’s fiancée and her father, the slaughter of her own children), you wonder how – and why – she managed it. The problem with making Medea into one of those distraught Susan Smith types, pushed by creepy men into moral regions we can’t ever inhabit, is that it substitutes pat psychological nostrums (‘Someone pushed to the place where she has no choice’: thus Warner) for something that is much more horrific – and vital – in the play. Euripides’ Medea is terrifying and grotesque precisely because her motivations aren’t those of a wounded housewife, but those of a heroic temperament following the brutal logic of heroism: to inflict harm on your enemies at all costs, even if – as here – those enemies turn out to be your own kin.

You could argue, indeed, that what makes Euripides’ heroine awesome is not that she’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that, if anything, she has the capacity to think like a man. Or, perhaps, like a lawyer. Euripides, we know, was very interested in the developing art of rhetoric, an instrument of great importance in the workings of the Athenian state. The patent content of Euripides’ play, the material that seems to be about female suffering, is by now so famous, and so familiar-seeming, that it has obscured the play’s other preoccupations: chief among these is the use and abuse of language. In every scene, Medea is presented as a skilled orator; she knows how to manipulate each of her interlocutors in order to get what she wants, from the chorus (to whom she smoothly suggests that she’s a helpless girl, just like them) to the Corinthian king Creon, whom she successfully manipulates by appealing to his male vanity. Indeed, we’re told from the play’s prologue right on through the rest of the drama that what possesses Medea’s mind is not simply that her husband has left her for a younger woman, but that Jason has broken the oath (an ironclad prenup if ever there was one) that he once made to her. Oaths are crucial throughout the play: its central scene has her administering one to Aegeus, the Athenian king, who happens to be passing through Corinth on this terrible day, and who is made to swear to Medea that he will offer her sanctuary at Athens, should she ever go there. (Among other things, this oath furnishes her with her escape plan: rather than being an emotional wreck, Medea is always calculating, always thinking ahead.)

For the Greeks, all this had deep political implications. One of the reasons everyday Athenians were suspicious of the Sophists, those deconstructionists of the Greek world (with whom Socrates was mistakenly lumped in the common man’s mind, not least because Aristophanes, in another satirical play, put him there), was that the rhetorical skills they were thought to teach could confound meaning itself – could ‘make the worse argument seem the better’, and vice versa. In Jason, Euripides created a character who is a parody of sophistry: he’s glibness metastasized, rhetorical expertise gone amok. When he enters and tells Medea that he’s only marrying this young princess for Medea’s own sake, that he’s doing it all for her and the kids, it’s not because he thinks it’s true: it’s because he thinks he can get away with saying it’s true. Language, words – it’s all a game to him. Look, Euripides seems to be saying to his audience, men for whom the ability to make a persuasive speech could be, sometimes literally, a matter of life or death: look what moral corruption your rhetorical skills can lead to. Medea, of course – obsessed from the beginning of the play with oaths, the speech act whose purpose it is to fuse word and deed – is outraged by her husband’s glibness, and spends her one remaining day in Corinth seeking ways to make him see the value of that which he so slickly uses merely as argumentative window dressing: his marriage, his children. That is why she kills the children. (The typically Euripidean irony – one that would likely have unnerved the Athenians – is that this spirited defence of language is mounted by a woman, and a foreigner: a sign, perhaps, of the sorry state public discourse was in.)

A Medea that was all about the moral disintegration that follows from linguistic collapse probably wouldn’t sell a great many tickets in an age that revels in seeing characters ‘deal with’ being failures, but it’s the play that Euripides wrote. Because Deborah Warner thinks that Medea is a disappointed housewife, and the play she inhabits is a drama of a marriage gone sour, all of the political resonances are lost. (When Shaw administers that crucial oath to Aegeus, she shrugs with embarrassment, as if she has no idea how this silly stuff is done, or what it’s all supposed to be about.) At the Brooks Atkinson, her Jason, a very loud man called Jonathan Cake, has been instructed to play that crucial first exchange between Medea and Jason totally straight – as if he believes what he tells Medea. (‘He believes his argument that if he marries Creon’s daughter they will get this thing called security,’ the director told the Guardian.) But if Jason is earnest – if he really believes what he’s saying, which is that he’s running off with a bimbo and abandoning his children and allowing them to be sent into exile because, hey, it’s good for them! – then the scene, to say nothing of the play, crumbles to pieces. If you take away the mighty conflict over language, over meaning what you say, Medea is just a daytime drama about two nice people who have lost that special spark. But then what do you do with the rest of the play, with its violence and anguished choruses and harrowing narratives of gruesome deaths – and, most of all, with the climactic slaughter – all of which follow only from Medea’s burning mission to put the meaning back in Jason’s empty