Medea (play) in the context of "Medea"

Jason (/ˈdʒeɪ.sən/ JAY-sən; Ancient Greek: Ἰάσων, romanized: Iásōn [i.ǎːsɔːn]) was an ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, whose quest for the Golden Fleece is featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea, the granddaughter of the sungod Helios.

Jason appeared in various literary works in the classical world of Greece and Rome, including the epic poem Argonautica and the tragedy Medea. In the modern world, Jason has emerged as a character in various adaptations of his myths, such as the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts and the 2000 TV miniseries of the same name.

Philoctetes (Ancient Greek: Φιλοκτήτης) is a tragedy by the Athenian poet Euripides. It was probably first produced in 431 BCE at the Dionysia in a tetralogy that included the extant Medea and was awarded third prize. It is now lost except for a few fragments. Much of what we know of the plot is from the writings of Dio Chrysostom, who compared the Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles and also paraphrased the beginning of Euripides' play.

Helen Elizabeth McCrory OBE (17 August 1968 – 16 April 2021) was an English actress. After studying at the Drama Centre London, she made her professional stage debut in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1990. Other theatre roles include playing Lady Macbeth in Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe, Olivia in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It in the West End for which she received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination, and Medea in the eponymous play at the Royal National Theatre.

McCrory is known for her film roles as Françoise in Charlotte Gray (2001); Cherie Blair in both The Queen (2006) and The Special Relationship (2010), alongside Michael Sheen, who portrayed husband and Prime Minister Tony Blair in both; Narcissa Malfoy in the final three Harry Potter films (2009, 2010, 2011); Mama Jeanne in Hugo (2011); and Clair Dowar in the James Bond film Skyfall (2012). She was also known for her television roles as Polly Gray in the BBC series Peaky Blinders (2013–2019); Madame Kali in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful (2014–15); Emma Banville in the ITV series Fearless (2017); and Kathryn Villiers in the BBC mini-series MotherFatherSon (2019).

Médée is a French language opéra-comique by Luigi Cherubini. The libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman (Nicolas Étienne Framéry) was based on Euripides' tragedy of Medea and Pierre Corneille's play Médée. It is set in the ancient city of Corinth.

The opera was premiered on 13 March 1797 at the Théâtre Feydeau, Paris. It met with a lukewarm reception and was not immediately revived. During the twentieth century, it was usually performed in Italian translation as Medea, with the spoken dialogue replaced by recitatives not authorized by the composer. More recently, some performances have used Cherubini's original version.

Tereus (Ancient Greek: Τηρεύς, Tēreus) is a lost Greek play by the Athenian poet Sophocles. Although fragments have long been known, the discovery of a synopsis among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has allowed an attempt at a reconstruction. Although the date that the play was first produced is not known, it is known that it was produced before 414 BCE, because the Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes referenced Tereus in his play The Birds, which was first performed in 414. Thomas B. L. Webster dates the play to near but before 431 BCE, based on circumstantial evidence from a comment Thucydides made in 431 about the need to distinguish between Tereus and the King of Thrace, Teres, which Webster believes was made necessary by the popularity of Sophocles's play around this time causing confusion between the two names. Based on references in The Birds it is also known that another Greek playwright, Philocles, had also written a play on the subject of Tereus, and there is evidence both from The Birds and from a scholiast that Sophocles' play came first.

Some scholars believe that Sophocles' Tereus was influenced by Euripides' Medea, and thus must have been produced after 431. However, this is not certain and any influence may well have been in the opposite direction, with Sophocles' play influencing Euripides. Jenny Marsh believes that Euripides' Medea did come before Sophocles' Tereus, based primarily on a statement in Euripides' chorus "I have heard of only one woman, only one of all that have lived, who put her hand on her own children: Ino." Marsh takes this to imply that as of the time of Medea's production, the myth of Tereus had not yet incorporated the infanticide, as it did in Sophocles' play. Akiko Kiso was the first Japanese scholar to publish on Sophocles. In 1984 Kiso published The Lost Sophocles, which reconsidered fragments of Sophocles' lost works. It included reconstructions of Epigoni and Tereus.