A Fierce Modern Medea (with a Scots inflection)
Review of the Nick Hern Books paperback (2023) adapted from the Ancient Greek original by Euripides (431 BCE).

Medea: flesh of my flesh revenge
Jason: I must have been mad was mad for you
I did not know you
I know you now!
Medea: tigress? fury? harpy? witch? she-wolf?
monster? yes I am
for I have torn out your heart and devoured it
Jason: your pain is just as bad as mine
Medea: wrong for I have your pain to comfort me

I'm quoting the above excerpt to give an example of why this is an adaptation rather than a translation of the Euripides original. A sample of the parallel dialogue in a standard translation (Rex Warner in 1944, reprinted in the Dover Thrift Editions series) reads as:

Jason: You feel the pain yourself. You share in my sorrow.
Medea: Yes, and my grief is gain when you cannot mock it.

Liz Lochhead makes other significant changes to the text, even though most of it still has parallels in the Euripides play. The King of Athens is dropped as a character (along with his scene) and instead Glauke, the princess of Corinth, is brought in to have her own confrontation with Medea. The most interesting change is to have some of the characters perform their dialogue in a Scots-inflected English, signifying that they are natives of Corinth. Medea and Jason speaking in regular English are outsiders who have taken refuge in Corinth after having escaped into exile.

See photo at https://supercool-nts.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/Productions/Archive/Medea...
Medea confronts Jason while the Chorus looks on. Image sourced from the National Theatre of Scotland.

This was a fierce and modern Medea which is still all the more horrifying for the revenge and maternal filicide murder plot at its heart. Lochhead's Medea is not portrayed as a supernatural sorceress though, but rather as a human being with advanced skills in poisoning. There is no deus ex machina chariot in the sky for her at the end.

I read Liz Lochhead's Medea after reading the retelling of the Medea mythology in Laura Alcoba's Through the Forest (2024). The Lochhead struck me as likely to be the most radical contemporary retelling. When I searched Goodreads, it seemed as if there is a Medea zeitgeist in the offing. There are two recent novelizations: Eilish Quin's Medea (February 13, 2024) and Rosie Hewlett's Medea (March 21, 2024). In Toronto, the Canadian Opera Company will perform Cherubini's opera in May 2024. Who am I to ignore the signs 🤔? Thus, a Medea deep-dive begins.
See the promo photo for the COC production here: https://cdn.agilitycms.com/canadian-opera-company-v2/images/productions/WebAsset...

Other Reviews
Reviews of the National Theatre of Scotland's theatrical performances of Liz Lochhead's Medea can be read at The Guardian and at The Edinburgh Reporter.

Trivia and Links
You can see the trailer for the National Theatre of Scotland theatrical performances at YouTube here. ( )