Medea is one of those plays that I generally enjoy seeing, as despite its goriness, it is an opportunity for our greatest actresses to show us the full range of their skills. Helen McCrory’s astonishing performance of a couple of years ago will have a long life in my memory. I have always enjoyed Kate Fleetwood’s performances (most recently in a very different role in High Society) so it was with a pleasant sense of anticipation that I set off for  Islington.

The Almeida’s Greeks season has been, to my mind, an unqualified success. Oresteia was stunning and Bakkhai pleasantly memorable (although there was far too much of the chorus). This version of Medea was the most radically changed from the original of all of the Greeks season plays. I enjoyed it and thought it enormously effective, but I do not anticipate a long life for this, as it is vividly and determinedly tied to life in London circa 2015.

Fleetwood’s Medea is an immediately recognisable North London type: beautiful, not in the first flush of youth and very conscious of that fact, and deeply despairing of where her life and energy have gone. Jason (a diffident and frustrated Jason Salinger) has left her for a younger, richer woman, and this is destroying her. She is reevaluating her life and her decision to have children, as many women do (but of course never admit it). She focuses, increasingly, on that part of her children that comes from Jason, and the love and hate for him are transferred to the children in the end. This, again, seemed very realistic to me. It is only natural to respond most strongly to the elements in your children that come from yourself, and to react negatively to those elements that come from your partner and which you don’t particularly like.

This soul-searching is reinforced well by the chorus, transformed into a group of North London yummy mummies, who make it clear that Medea’s questioning does not fit in with the herd. This again rings very true, as I understand that those who have children are often shocked by the conformity required at the school gate. If one doesn’t fit in, life becomes very difficult. Michele Austin added a welcome dose of reality as the Brazilian cleaner who doesn’t have the luxury of ennui enjoyed by the North London privileged brigade. It was interesting to make Richard Cant’s Aegeus a gay man contemplating having children with his partner via surrogate, but it did not add much to the play beyond expanding the discussion of parenthood and felt rather detached and academic.

Andy de la Tour’s outstanding performance as Creon was anything but dry and academic. He now controls Medea’s finances, her lifeline to the outside world. In one devastating scene, he lays bare all of the insecurities that many 40-something women feel, from the loss of their looks to becoming invisible to more intimate physical changes. It was like having one’s soul exposed to the world by a particularly vicious London taxi driver. Rachel Cusk has outdone herself with this play, navel-gazing though it may appear.

Fleetwood’s performance is, of course, outstanding. You truly felt her love, her rage and her anguish. I have never felt such lack of sympathy for Jason, and I have never felt the inevitability of the end of the play more strongly. I am still not sure whether it was a truly extraordinary version of the play or it only seemed extraordinary because it was set so close to my own milieu, but it was, undeniably, gripping and beautifully acted. Closing soon, but highly recommended.