As challenges go writer and director Mike Bartlett likes to set the benchmark high. His acclaimed adaptation of Chariots of Fire saw actors charging at full pelt around the Hampstead Theatre and the show has since transferred to the Gielgud Theatre. 

Mike is currently associate playwright at Paines Plough and in 2011 he was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre. His play Love, Love, Love won Best New Play in the 2011 Theatre Awards UK and his 2009 Royal Court production Cock won an Olivier Award in 2010. His latest adaptation, of Euripides’ Medea sees Rachael Stirling (The Recruiting Officer, Women in Love and Tipping the Velvet) take the lead in a role that her mother Diana Rigg commanded 20 years earlier in Jonathan Kent’s powerful West End production of the play.

Mike’s Medea could not be more different. His contemporary staging removes the story from classical Greece and thrusts it into the confines of a British housing estate. The play opened in Glasgow last month.

“Mike’s vision is of an Ikea Medea with flaming red hair, dressed in a tracksuit and living in a two up, two down in the commuter belt,” says Rachael. “It’s the everyday, contemporary and recognisable story of a woman who falls in love with man. She rescues him on holiday swimming off the shores of Crete and moves to a town where she’s very much an outsider. She puts everything into this man and he abandons her for the younger, blonder daughter of their landlord.”

Medea opens this week at Watford Palace Theatre. Mike tells me he wants to take the play out to audiences beyond the thrall of the London stage. “I love going out and telling a story to audiences who have bought a ticket and turned up and you have to respect them for making the effort. That makes it gripping. They’re not interested in your career and how it fits into the history of British Theatre. What they want to know is what relevance does this have to me and that can be incredibly demanding. These are absolutely the audiences I’m interested in and will totally invest in. All you can want as a writer and director is that kind of response.”

According to Rachael, the play went down a storm in Glasgow.
“Playing this suburban Medea is most satisfying and the joyous outcome is being accosted by gaggles of 15-year-old Scottish girls who have been totally blown away by her character and wit,” she says. “She’s bombastic, brave and an intelligent articulate woman. The audience are smitten and captured from the minute they meet her.”

Medea’s power does not hold sway over her husband, however, and here the play takes a darker turn. Wronged and unable to understand why she has been betrayed by her husband, Medea plots a terrible vengeance, leading to incalculable tragedy.

Mike’s modern Medea makes us realise where the real tragedy exists.
“We see the word tragedy all the time in the news stories and hear of terrible events that happen in families,” says Mike. “In the classic tragic form a lot of things get in way of connecting things with real life such as beliefs, structure, gods and palaces that are not really a part of what the play’s trying to do. I wanted to remove anything that detracted from the heart of that tragic moment. The horror drop of that experience when someone does a terrible thing.

“We like to think of ourselves as very civilised and we know the reasons behind our behaviour but there are moments when we can’t understand it and something more primal comes through.”

Medea is at Watford Palace Theatre from Tuesday, October 16 to Saturday, October 27. Details: 01923 225671, watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk