ABSTRACT
Like many playwrights before him, Mike Bartlett tried his hand at adapting a canonical Greek text, settling on the Euripides play Medea. Updating the story to the present, Bartlett asks what if Medea was a working woman who lived in the suburbs of an unnamed English city and discovered her husband had left her for a young dancer with nice legs? While an intriguing premise with some promising moments, the play was not entirely successful as Bartlett had difficulties transferring the violently vengeful acts of Medea into his highly realistic rendering of contemporary life. However, as is his wont, Bartlett did not dismiss this Medea-inspired character, and a few years later he returned to the vengeful wife trope and wrote an extremely popular and award-winning television series for the BBC called Doctor Foster about a successful general practitioner who discovers her husband is having an affair. Over the course of the series she gets revenge against his lies. This chapter will briefly discuss Bartlett’s Medea before examining in more detail the nature of Doctor Foster’s connection with its ancient Greek antecedent and Bartlett’s use of the ritual of dinner parties for dramatic effect before ending with a discussion of the television series Life, where Bartlett once again explores the narrative device of the wronged wife.
