The narrow dividing line between tragedy and unintended comedy was illustrated last year at the National Theatre when Helen Mirren’s Phèdre provoked laughter from the audience with excesses of jealous fury.

It was evident again last week at the Playhouse with Northern Broadsides’ new version of Euripides’ Medea in which a vengeful wife slaughters her two children to wreak revenge on a husband who has dumped her for younger totty.

Hardly much cause for levity there, then. Yet there were moments during the taut 90-minute drama when laughter came easily to the lips. Occasionally, this arose from the way matters were dealt with in Tom Paulin’s specially commissioned new translation. I do not think it wise, for instance, that Nina Kristofferson’s Medea should have told her husband Jason to “f*** off” – partly, of course, because he already had.

Mind you, the oily creep depicted by Andrew Pollard certainly deserved rough handling. You hardly need to be the stoutest supporter of feminist causes to see that he had treated his wife appallingly – running off the with the king’s daughter, then telling Medea that this new royal connection would be to the advantage of all.

As portrayed by Barry Rutter, who also directed the play, King Creon was far from projecting a regal demeanour. In his cream suit and brown bowler hat he looked likely at any moment to deliver a song and dance act in Archie Rice style.

This might not have surprised in a production where music already had a prominent role. Some of Medea’s bloodiest pronouncements, and acts, were accompanied by the clashing of giant cymbals and wailing electric guitar.

The chorus of women (Michelle Hardwick, Barbara Hockaday and Heather Phoenix) doubled as a blues trio and, later, a mouth organ band. That was more cause for merriment, I’d say, since there is something innately comic in the harmonica which even a player of the genius of Larry Adler could never entirely dispel.

Overall, however, this was a successful adaptation of the play. Medea was vividly shown to suffer in Athens both as a woman and as an outsider. This made her dreadful actions at least understandable if never forgivable.