For a man at the cutting edge of modern theatre, Australian director Simon Stone has always had a healthy obsession with the past. From his groundbreaking 2012 Belvoir Thyestes, a bloodthirsty contemporary retelling of Seneca’s take on the vicious dynastic politics of the House of Atreus, to his shocking, visceral Yerma, which based a 21st-century woman’s spiralling preoccupation with conceiving a child on Lorca’s 1934 original, he’s forced us to confront ancient horrors we likely hoped belonged to bygone times.

Gabriel Amoroso as Edgar, Rose Byrne as Anna and Bobby Cannavale as Lucas in Medea. Photo © Richard Termine

“Why choose this very old play?” David Lan asks the director in the program note for Stone’s Medea, which has transferred from London’s Young Vic to Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Because what happens in the play keeps happening,” is the simple answer. Stone goes on to explain that it may be less common nowadays, but women still kill their children (though far less often than men do), his point being that we ignore the warnings of writers like Euripides at our peril.

It turns out the...