Sophie Okonedo is to star as Medea at the new West End theatre @sohoplace in a production directed by Dominic Cooke next year.
Cooke described Euripides’s Medea as “a play defined by the actor who plays it” and said that Okonedo has the “visceral power, intelligence and courage to … go to the extreme places that the part demands”. When he first approached her with the idea, the Oscar-nominated actor had a busy schedule and was unconvinced but agreed to a rehearsed reading, which the director described as electrifying.
The production will use a translation from 1946 by the American poet Robinson Jeffers and all of the male roles will be played by one actor, Ben Daniels. “At its core, Medea is about the battle between archetypal male and female ideas of power,” explained Cooke. “Jason has been pulled away from Medea by the patriarchal values of his society; conformity to duty, order and control. In many ways, all the male characters are agents of these forces, attempting to pressure Medea, a powerful, unpredictable female foreigner, to conform to the status quo. So, I wondered if having one actor playing all the male characters as different versions of the same force might work.”
Okonedo said that she was both “really excited and a touch nervous” about the role and that she had been impressed by @sohoplace when she toured the space while it was under construction. The West End’s first new purpose-built theatre in 50 years, it is owned by producer Nica Burns and is part of a £300m regeneration of the area by Tottenham Court Road underground station. The theatre has a constellation theme that was inspired by Burns’s night-time performances, as a young actor, at the ancient outdoor theatre of Epidaurus in Greece.
The flexible playing space at the 602-seater @sohoplace attracted Cooke: “It didn’t feel right to put the play behind a 19th-century proscenium arch, where actors and audience are in different rooms. In the ancient Greek theatre, the audience are visible to everyone and are a crucial component in the meaning of the play. In Medea, they become witnesses to the decisions that the protagonist makes, forced into inhabiting her decisions as she moves towards the play’s shattering conclusion. We couldn’t imagine a better auditorium for what we have in mind.”
This version of Euripides’s tragedy will be designed by Vicki Mortimer and co-produced by Fictionhouse, the company run by Cooke and Kate Horton. Fictionhouse’s debut production, Good, starring David Tennant, is currently at the Harold Pinter theatre.
Okonedo and Daniels previously co-starred in the play Haunted Child at the Royal Court in 2011. Cooke directed Daniels in The Normal Heart at the National Theatre and has worked several times with Okonedo, including on Arabian Nights at the Young Vic in 1998. Medea will have a 10-week run and begins previews on 11 February.
