Euripides' play can still grip an audience 2500 years after it was written, here performed by the Roughcast Theatre Company at Laxfield Village Hall.

Euripides' play can still grip an audience 2500 years after it was written, here performed by the Roughcast Theatre Company at Laxfield Village Hall.

Extreme emotions in extreme circumstances, within the family, all in a controlled, austere form, create drama which travels.

Only a company who have tested themselves against the big stuff would attempt Greek tragedy. But, despite an Englishness which invariably hampers our actors, the rewards are duly won.

Unnerving music by Michael Posen, with a plangent chorus of five women, in plain garb and white visaged, looking as though they have been disturbed during a facial, set the tone of David Green's production.

Annie Chapman, as the Nurse, has a gaunt intensity and a sense of woe in the face of implacable forces. Messengers in Greek plays have one big speech in which they recount offstage violence. In this part Bruce Cox has extraordinary power.

Yves Green's Medea is in a line from her Lady Macbeth. Paired with a good middleweight, in Paul Baker's Jason, she runs the whole gamut of suffering and resentful anger, so that we finally understand and accept her apparent wickedness. It is a major performance of a major role.