If you are into Greek myth, this is a fantastic theatrical season. There was the excellent Thyestes at the Arcola, there is the Jean Racine’s take (in a Ted Hughes’ translation) on Phèdre’s story at the National, with Dame Helen Mirren, and there is a number of Medeas either now showing or coming up, including Slovenian playwright Saša Rakef’s Product Medea 4.0 - the run at the Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn has already finished, but it will be at the Camden Roundhouse in August as part of the Camden Fringe Festival.

You might not be familiar with Medea’s myth, and if you are going to see Product Medea 4.0, this is actually a good thing, as the first ten minutes of the show are spent listening to the actors summarising it in a way that is boring and perhaps slightly annoying for those who do know it, but probably doesn’t do much to enlighten those who don’t. Yet, this is just the beginning of the night, and if you are patient (as you probably need to be, given that in this small space leaving would be a strong statement), you will be rewarded.

Product Medea 4.0 is not strictly about the myth of Medea, so you do not need to know the story in great detail anyway. Suffice it to say that Medea is a woman who was betrayed by her husband, for whom she had sacrificed her family and her land, and who reacts by taking her vengeance and killing several people, including her own children, in her blind fury against her husband and everything he loves. Product Medea shows us what a cynical, shameless, and callous (hence extremely plausible) marketing firm might do with with this woman - or, in blunter terms, how they might sell her. How do you turn Medea into a desirable, advertisable product? And how do you make people want every little piece of her?

First of all, you turn her into a victim. The sheer violence, masqueraded as care, with which the four women of the marketing company abuse Medea physically and emotionally, making her into a savage, tangling her hair and smearing her face with dirt, is perhaps the strongest point of the production. And it’s an extremely interesting and intelligent comment on what we do to public figures we like to think we want to help, how we find it easier to sympathise (and to control) those who have been ‘traumatised’, with a wink to Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction on betrayed women and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Medea, played with transport by Nikki Squire, is initially destroyed, but soon reacts, quoting long lines from Euripides’ original play - except that the lines she would direct at her vile husband, Jason, she is now directing to the manager of the firm and his collaborators, a well-crafted overlapping effect that allows the Greek material to flow naturally into the contemporary one.

As the tension and the rage escalate, so does the gobsmacking, only partly amusing bad taste of the salespeople, who start auctioning off Medea’s jewels and end up, in a crescendo which includes a live exchange with the audience, auctioning the tiny trainers Medea’s child was wearing when she killed him. And the reason this is only partly amusing is that it is a very sharp image of this place and this time, of what we do to women who are too beautiful and fashionable for us to like them while they are happy but whose death starts off a sanctification by the public opinion (as in the case of Princess Diana), of how much hatred we can muster up against mothers who might have hurt their children (see Kate McCann), of how morbidly we swallow up every little piece of dirt associated with a public figure when that public figure is tragically destroyed - see Michael Jackson.

Rakef’s play is a stimulating and clever experiment that weaves the contemporary and the ancient together in unexpected ways - the marketing girls becoming wailing mourners in one fluid movement. The execution is not as consistently high as one might wish, and that unfortunate beginning is partly to blame if it takes us a bit longer to get into the spirit of things, but when the evening is good, it is very good. I am not sure whether the glory of the murderer-to-victim transformation staging should go mainly to Maja Milatovic-Ovadia’s directing or to Verana Meneses’ choreography, but either way it deserves high praise. You will also be treated to original, live music by James Palmer. And should you not be able to make it to Camden, it will also be streamed live on the official website of the production.

Run now over; at the Camden Roundhouse, 6-8 August 2009