Just your everyday 21st-century sexually obsessed and betrayed celebrity sorceress is Fiona Shaw’s Medea, who makes her entrance in shades, sneakers, and a little black cardigan hugged about a sundress. " Ladies, " she addresses the Chorus of shopping-bag-toting Enquiring Minds, so silkily you might not know she’d lost it if you hadn’t already seen the breathless au pair bolt from the house to hide the knives and the pills. This Medea, which originated at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 2000 and won London Evening Standard Awards for both Shaw and director Deborah Warner last year, is the most successful transplantation of a classical play in recent memory. Savage, thundering Judith Anderson, so famous in the role 50 years ago, may be doing a rotisserie number in her grave. But Irish actress Shaw, in a performance stripped of vanity and sanity though not of cunning and scathing wit, has a spin of her own.

From the outset this is a Medea that merges the revenge tragedy etched in theatergoing memory with reinvention, the legend of a fearsome woman scorned with the spectacle of one dangerously fragmenting. Tom Pye’s set, its shimmeringly reflected frontyard pool surrounded by stacked piles of flagstone and strewn concrete blocks, suggests a lavish-living family only recently moved in. In other words, Medea (in Kenneth McLeish & Frederic Raphael’s razor-sharp 1994 translation a self-described " souvenir from foreign parts " ) is even more outsider than an established exile might be, and abandoning husband Jason has wasted no time getting himself engaged to the local honcho’s daughter.

Medea, when she arrives to greet her brush-with-fame-seeking neighbors putting up a front of containment but looking barely thrown together, seems a woman as gripped by depression as by rage. Lucid yet skittish, she takes hairpin turns from yearning to disgust to corrosive fury, the actress so in control that she dares a bit of flippancy as she rounds the corners. (Shaw’s Medea even makes fun of her celebrity, flexing her biceps as she recaps, for the impressed and hovering Chorus, her granddaughter-of-the-sun lineage.)

Moreover, in Shaw’s portrayal, Medea is a woman whose center is in her belly and below. Abristle with angularity, often ferally crouched or rubbing herself, she is ragged with a sexual desire that, even as she rages at Jonathan Cake’s younger and handsome Jason, he can spark with a well-aimed touch. As horrifying and heartbreaking as the production is, the chemistry between these two, who in the end find themselves alone together like drowned rats in a bath of blood and water, is such that it’s also — and this adds to the devastation — sexy.

The compact, muscular Shaw’s revelatory performance is almost a contradiction in that it hurtles down the play’s horrible, fated course while at the same time pulling in wildly different directions, from anger through which the character can barely speak to maniacally baby-talking tenderness, from revenge-bent determination to lethal autopilot. The actress and her frequent collaborator, director Warner, seem to have looked at every utterance anew and determined to make the play as natural and spontaneous as it is weighty and emotional. This approach also works with the frumpy gaggle of Everywomen who make up the Chorus, no august body of witnesses but a quintet of tutting, clucking, awed individuals. One of the women, as the agitation mounts in anticipation of the announced infanticide and we see Medea chasing the children behind the locked glass doors of her house, throws up; another nervously clog-dances to the mounting electronic scream of Mel Mercier’s effective soundscape.

Cake, as the tightly bejeaned and then lounge-lizardish Jason, almost matches Shaw in range of reaction, striding up the aisle with an accusatory bellow, only to move to smug, opportunistic sweet talk as he tries to convince Medea that his leaving her is in her interest, and finally to incredulous grief. Understandable that, since the two small blond boys (alternated among Dylan Denton, Alexander Scheitinger, and Michael Tommer), trotting on with their backpacks or prodding their wooden boats across the pool with sticks, are about as unmurderable as is imaginable. And watching their mother numbly pick up toys without owners at the end of the play is worse than watching the blood spatter as the unspeakable occurs, closer to the action than is usual in Greek drama, where violence comes by proxy and moral lessons come by direction. " Expect the unexpected, " intones a Chorus member, trying to extract wisdom from the carnage. But the genius of this Medea is that the inevitable, however expected, leaves you drained and trembling.