Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English
from c.1970 to the Present  

Project Publications
(including Archived Conference papers)

A Democratic Turn

2009 Democratic Turn Eseminar

1998-2008 Archived topics

Medea

A Review by Professor Lorna Hardwick

(For other reviews of Medea please see database no. 2584)

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Chorus: Individual voices, integrated into the action. Special implications for Medea's speech to the Women of Corinth which was made in her dressing room and addressed to her staff.

Set: The opening sequence was set in Medea’s house. The centre part of the acting space was encircled by grey-painted chests of drawers open to reveal disrupted life and scattered clothes. Each of the chests had a tall back framework, like a square-holed trellis, which provided windows for characters to climb and to peer in and out of Medea’s constrained existence. The chests were on castors and were moved by the cast at crucial points of the play to suggest disintegration and to reframe the subsequent action in a different way. They also provided a mobile ‘enclosure’ for the final sequence in which Medea, cradling Jason, rotates away to her uncertain future.

Costume and set gave a late-nineteenth-/early twentieth-century and almost Ibsenesque ambience to Medea’s claustrophobic existence. Female characters wore dark colours, grey and black (contrast the conception of Medea as a red-costumed diva in the theatre babel production DB no 2562 ). The male characters were formally dressed. The Aegeus episode, in which the Athenian wore an American style fedora to match his accent added a touch of humour, the New World providing a refuge, but only for those who could get there under their own steam.

Mask : Limited use of mask by Medea at climax of the play (held mask in front of her face).

The performance reviewed (9th March, 2001) was near the end of the tour and continued to attract large and appreciative audiences. This audience at Worcester appeared slightly fazed by the open-ended and ambivalent ending with its lack of dragon chariot and its decision not to leave Jason as humiliated, defeated and de-heroised. The almost elegiac ending as Medea and Jason were swung round the sky in a bower created by the trellis frameworks of the moveable stage furniture certainly meshed with the director’s wish to avoid a ‘static and remote ending’. The subtle retreat by Medea behind her mask, held in front of her face after the emotionally draining scene in which she contemplated the dolls, the last remnant of the vulnerable aspect of her character, left to the audience the responsibility for puzzling out the meaning of the dénouement.

The performance, stripped of repetition and decoration in language or staging, underlined several aspects of this company’s recent development. As the Actors of Dionysus have moved out into Arts Theatres and towards wider audiences their progress has been marked by a growing integration of imaginative design and physical movement into the core of the action (see Bacchae, 2000, DB no. 2534 ) and by a willingness to challenge audience response by destabilising assumptions and expectations about performance style and the adaptation of the Greek conventions. This production was also marked by a memorable performance from Tamsin Shasha as Medea. Her direct communication of psychological trauma and disintegration and the mysterious transition into the next phase of Medea’s life revealed a growing sureness and depth in her portrayal of the figures of tragedy. The company has come a long way since its previous Medea (1996, DB no. 171) and because of the success of its more ambitious touring policy looks likely to become a significant influence nationally in shaping more sophisticated public perceptions of the possibilities of Greek drama.

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