“Medea” at Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock

Mark Brown in Inverclyde
★★★★★
23 March 2026

The first staging of this Medea – a crisp and vital adaptation of Euripides by Kathy McKean – was in 2022 during the Bard in the Botanics (BiB) mini-festival of Shakespeare and other classical plays which is held every summer in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. The production, which boasts the services of the extraordinary Nicole Cooper in the title role, scooped the Best Production gong and a Best Performance prize (for Cooper) in the 2022 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS).

Johnny Panchaud and Nicole Cooper.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

This touring revival (which BiB has mounted in association with the impressively active production company Raw Material) is richly deserved. Directed by BiB’s artistic director Gordon Barr, it features a fine supporting cast of Johnny Panchaud (Jason), Isabelle Joss (Nurse to Medea and Jason’s two young sons) and Alan Steele (as both Creon and the boys’ Tutor).

This tour takes the piece out of its original habitat of the Kibble Palace Victorian glasshouse in the Botanics (in which only minimal design is required). Designer Carys Hobbs’s stage (which is lit intelligently by Benny Goodman) depicts the courtyard of the modern day, Greek home from which Medea is in the midst of being expelled by King Creon.

Medea (who is an ”outsider” in Corinth: she hails from Colchis, in the modern day state of Georgia in the Cacusus) has been abandoned by her husband Jason (of the Argonauts fame), who is set to marry Princess Glauke. The king – who is fearful of Medea’s undisguised rage – wants the scorned woman out of his land ahead of his daughter’s nuptials.

The ensuing tragedy is as pungent, compelling and brutal as Euripides intended. Panchaud’s Jason swaggers around with the kind of undeserved, entitled confidence that we have come to associate with the fallen prince now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Joss’s Nurse is relatably working class, a woman sympathetic to Medea’s plight, but, first-and-foremost, protective of her young charges. Steele’s Creon tries (and fails) to hide his fear and his sense of fair play behind a veneer of imperiousness.

Johnny Panchaud and Nicole Cooper.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

However, the play is called Medea for a reason, revolving, as it does, around the titular demi-goddess (who is, in Ancient Greek mythology, the granddaughter of Helios, the sun god). Cooper performs the role with the same combination of visceral anguish, seductive guile and inextinguishable rage that wooed the critics five years ago.

Typically of this actor, this is a clever and nuanced performance. Cooper’s Medea has such shuddering emotional depth that – despite the terrible reckoning she has planned for Jason, Glauke and Creon – she becomes a sympathetic, almost feminist Everywoman.

Cooper is of Zambian and Greek heritage (she once told me that she dreams in the Greek language, which she learned as a child). Here – as in the original production in 2022 – her Medea speaks in Greek at certain moments.

This is – given Medea’s outsider status in Corinth – something of a masterstroke. Coming, as it does, at points of heightened pain or anger, the use of the Hellenic tongue adds an additional, affecting dimension to the portrayal.

Cooper has received more Best Actor prizes and nominations in the 23-year history of the CATS awards than any other performer. From roles such as Coriolanus, to Timon of Athens, Hamlet, Prospero, Lear’s Fool, Hedda Gabler and Queen Macbeth (in Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth, An Undoing), she has proved herself to be a top-echelon actor, worthy of, not only national, but also international acclaim.

This stunning revival of her Medea provides further proof – if it were needed – that she is an actor of unusual emotional intelligence and power.

Touring until April 11:  https://www.bardinthebotanics.co.uk/