Euripides MEDEA adapted by Kathy McKean (paperback)

Euripides
MEDEA
by Kathy McKean

In this urgent new adaptation after Euripides, Kathy McKean brings Medea startlingly close. In a space between myth and modernity, an outsider in Corinth watches her life rewritten: Jason trades the woman who saved him for power, and Creon offers exile as “mercy”. With no chorus of citizens to hide behind, the audience becomes witness, jury, confidant—drawn into Medea’s fierce intelligence, corrosive grief and incandescent rage.

McKean’s language is contemporary, muscular and lyrical, honouring the epic scale of Greek tragedy while exposing its intimate damage: love as compulsion, humiliation as fuel, vengeance as a force that burns everyone it touches. Medea fights to reclaim her story, her children and the sovereignty of her own heart. Written for a small cast—Nurse, Tutor, Jason and Creon—it builds to a breathtaking, brutal reckoning: terrifying, exhilarating and impossible to forget. A bold, accessible classic for modern audiences.

CAST: 4 actors
DURATION: 90 minutes

Additional content:

Foreword by actor Nicole Cooper
Introduction by writer Kathy McKean
Director’s note by Gordon Barr
Questions for Study & Discussion

The Salamander Street Classics series offers classical plays in fresh, contemporary versions that preserve the writer’s structure, tone and imagery while connecting anew with today’s actors and audiences.

Photography of Medea cast by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

Nicole Cooper as Medea (image: Twin City Pictures)