Published in the Guardian
Citizens/Headlong/Watford Palace
HE ENTERS in socks, tracksuit bottoms and faded grey T-shirt. Her
blood-red hair is a shade away from the glossy surfaces of her fitted
kitchen. Her son has just been dropped off by one of the neighbours.
None of this fits the archetypal image of Medea, which is what makes Mike Bartlett's version of the Euripides
classic initially so arresting. Behind the photorealist facade of Ruari
Murchison's suburban set, we find not a spurned wife in Corinth, but a
single mum living in a new-build residential street just beyond the
London commuter belt.
This Medea, played by Rachael Stirling with a take-no-prisoners wit, lives in a world of Richard Curtis movies
and Wii Fit games. Defiant and more than a little deranged, she runs
rings around her prim, middle-class neighbours (strong turns from Lu
Corfield and Amelia Lowdell), as she denies them the security of polite
conversation. She can switch in an instant from making a cup of tea to
listing the ways she'd like her estranged husband to die.
The
contrast is shocking and funny. This Medea is too big for a place like
this, her passions too intense, her intelligence too vicious, and in
Bartlett's own production, there are an unexpected number of laughs.
Those
laughs can quickly turn to distress, however, as Stirling reveals Medea
to be a woman suffering severe emotional trauma. She denies being
mentally ill, but it's hard to know how else to interpret the behaviour
of someone who locks herself in her room, plunges her hand into a pan of
boiling water and takes a knife to her only child. As writer, Bartlett
doesn't just transfer Euripides to the modern world – he exposes him to
the full weight of post-Freudian psychology.
Despite all this
illumination, however, the 2,000-year leap from ancient Greece to
gossipy middle England comes at a price. It isn't only Medea who is
confined and reduced by these circumstances. The play itself seems to
get smaller.
Instead of a conquering hero, Adam Levy's Jason is nice but
dull in a business suit. His complaints about Medea's behaviour are
perfectly reasonable; in these 21st-century terms, she is being over the
top and he's right to protest. At such moments, the play becomes a
soap-opera episode about a woman reacting badly to a messy divorce, her
fate seeming to be more private misfortune than archetypal tragedy.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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