Well, it sure isn't boring, though in the first ten minutes, with the female chorus yapping away incoherently, this Deborah Warner-directed Medea is damned annoying. And then Fiona Shaw arrives, a truly fascinating actress who manages to be simultaneously mannered yet mercurial. It's as if Warner told her to find specific gestures for every line of dialogue--and then kept every one of them in the show. This sense of trying too hard makes Medea's scenes with Jason (mush-voiced Jonathan Cake) feel like acting-class exercises rather than high drama, especially when set against Tom Pye's antiseptic set and Mel Mercier's bizarre soundscape. Though occasionally harrowing, this Medea makes too many weird choices to amount to anything more than a noisy contrivance.
