There's a heart-rending cry from an inner room. Ten minutes later Fiona Shaw springs through the door, beaming, asking for bananas; there are no bloodstains on her white T-shirt. In a short lunch-break between rehearsals she eats little, speaking in passionate rushes about Euripides, eyes wide, her musical tones inflected by her native Cork. When she describes the rehearsal process, under the direction of Deborah Warner, it sounds like a voyage into the unknown - "you just have to render yourself up to it, to wait for the waters to close over you" - which could take an indefinite length of time. The day after we met, The Abbey announced that Medea's opening would be postponed by five days, to allow more rehearsal time. The exploration continues.
The myth of Medea and her lover, Jason, was told and retold in the ancient world - by Pindar, Ovid, Apollonius Rhodius and Seneca, among others, and in visual art and literature ever since. The princess (goddess, in some versions) from Colchis on the Black Sea, who fell in love with the one-sandaled hero of the Argo, Jason, used her powers of sorcery to help him find the Golden Fleece, sailed with him to Thessaly and killed King Pelias, fled with him to Corinth and bore him two sons which she later murdered, has an enduring fascination. "There is no Medea," Shaw says, "there's only me and the text". Or, perhaps, there are many Medeas.
Euripides's tragedy, first performed in Athens in 431 BC, focuses on the latter part of the myth, in which Jason rejects Medea and marries the King of Corinth's young daughter to further his political ambitions. As a foreigner, Medea could never be his legitimate wife and he wants her out of the way. "She is all of us and none of us," Shaw says. "The play is endlessly relevant in its observations on sex and power, the way a man's need for power as he grows older supersedes his need for love or passion."
Jason orders Medea to leave the city. She, in revenge, kills Jason's new bride, the bride's father and her own two children and seeks sanctuary in Athens. "It's not a tragedy," Fiona Shaw says, "it's a catastrophe."
At first, Medea is presented as a victim, with whom the chorus of Corinthian women sympathises, but its - and the audience's - reaction turns to horror as Medea plans her revenge. "Everything is stacked against her, in terms of our sympathy," Shaw says. "It's very challenging for an actor. You have to find the human element in her character, her vulnerability, her failure, and you don't find that by judging it. You can only get that by being terribly open and this goes against `acting'. "
The play is a roller-coaster, expressed in blunt, often visceral language, which Kenneth McLeish's translation emphasises. It casts men and women as eternal, implacable enemies, with Medea and Jason (played by Patrick O'Kane in this production) embodying extremes of the feminine and masculine. The action unfolds over a few short hours, with little pause between Medea's decision and her actions. For a brief moment she reflects, before steeling herself: "I understand the horror of what I'm going to do, but anger, the spring of all life's horror, masters my resolve." Her thumos (passion, spirit) is stronger than her reasoning. Questions of determinism, of human freedom versus divine design and of the individual's responsibility for his or her actions permeate Greek tragedy. In Euripides's play, Medea seems to be at the mercy of an irresistible force and also an embodiment of it. She kills her children to punish Jason for his betrayal, to break his heart, even though their deaths will also cause her pain. (Jason: "You suffer too; my loss is yours no less." Medea: "It is true. But my pain is a fair price, to take away your smile.")
"The issue of responsibility keeps coming up," Shaw says. "Medea is responsible for her actions but says that Jason is. The two of them debate and argue from opposite poles, and as is so often the way in Greek tragedy, the truth is somewhere in between. The point is, we've no real way of dealing with the chaotic aspects of who we are. We do cause unnecessary pain to each other and there's a knock-on effect. Jason's decision to discard Medea for another woman results in his losing his father-in-law, his old wife, his new wife and his children."
It's a high price. Medea, meanwhile, is promised sanctuary in Athens and given divine protection at the end of the play, appearing in a chariot surrounded by winged serpents, well out of Jason's reach. Aristotle criticised the play for this use of divine intervention, arguing that "the denouement should arise from the action of the play itself".
It is certainly ambiguous - yet, while she does seem to escape unpunished, it seems unlikely that Medea will ever have any peace. "She's definitely going to pay the price," Shaw says. "Most women who are responsible for their children's deaths kill themselves. It would be much easier for her to die, but she's going to go on living in order to witness Jason's unhappiness."
Shaw's fascination with Greek tragedy dates from her riveting performance as Sophocles's Electra ("an embodiment of grief") in 1989, in an RSC production directed by Deborah Warner, which was the beginning of their artistic collaboration. Her knowledge of philosophy, which she studied at UCC, gives her a way into the texts. She is excited by ideas. "These plays were written at one of the most exciting times in human development, when the whole notion of self-consciousness was being developed. Euripides was charting an inner landscape."
From Electra and Richard II (played by Shaw as a "non-male") to her solo performances of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and now Medea, Shaw seems to be drawn to characters in extremis. "It's not that, really. I try to do work that is risky, yes, and which speaks to me. I want to explore the grander things that bring us transcendence, and characters in tragedy embody more of the best of human qualities than the rest of us. But you know, there are very few truly great plays.
"It's not as if I just sit around and select whatever plays I want to do. The time and place have to be right. I wouldn't go as far as to say, with Peter Brook, that a play chooses you, but everything has to come together. It's a long time since there's been a Medea in Dublin, and it seemed to be an interesting place in which to investigate it, a city going through enormous changes. Under Deborah's direction, the Chorus will all be coming on as themselves - who they are in Dublin, and the setting (designed by Tom Pye) is concrete and glass. It's a world really, not a set - it's deconstructed.
"I didn't think I'd be visiting the Greeks again for a while, in fact. I was asked about playing Clytemnestra in the Oresteia in London but I couldn't return to that place, that house of Atreus. I think it's because I had immersed myself so completely in Electra. In a way when you play in Greek tragedy - or in Ibsen - you give all your Greeks and all your Ibsens in that moment."
Film work, while less absorbing than theatre, is a relief from this intensity: sometimes - Undercover Blue comes to mind - she makes films just for fun. She speaks warmly about her experience of playing Mrs Nugent in Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy, a role in which her comic talent shone. She can currently be seen as the sophisticated, ambivalent character, Marda Norton, in The Last September, based on Elizabeth Bowen's novel, as adapted by John Banville and directed by Deborah Warner.
Shaw looks strikingly like Bowen in the film; on a recent promotional tour of the US, she was introduced as the novelist. It's obvious that she's an admirer. In a recent BBC Radio Four programme she visited the site of Bowen's former home in Co Cork, Bowen's Court, now a heap of stones, and spoke eloquently, as ever, about the novelist's background, sensibility and Anglo-Irish milieu. After Medea, Shaw will be immersing herself in the life and work of Virginia Woolf, another heroine, for a film based on Woolf's relationship with Vita-Sackville West, to be directed by Phyllida Law. Eileen Atkins's stage show, Vita and Virginia, was intended to be played in its screen adaptation by Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave, but the project has been so long in the pipeline that these actresses have decided that they are too old for the roles. Shaw is now to play Virginia Woolf. Her eyes gleam.
"I have a feeling that this is going to become a huge obsession," she says, then laughs: "another one. I'm fascinated by the ordinariness of Woolf's life, and by her suicide attempts, the secrecy of that. Someone who has charted that pitch of emotional life and has monitored it so meticulously has an enormous amount to tell us about who we are." And that, for Shaw, is what matters.
Medea opens at The Abbey on Tuesday, June 6th, with previews from May 29th