Medea at The Scoop

Medea at The Scoop

04 August, 2009
by: Tom Cameron

It’s very difficult to accuse a production of Medea of going too far. It is, after all, the character’s chief trait: her love for the hero Jason has led her – prior to the events of Euripides’ tragedy – to leave home and her father after helping Jason to take the golden fleece from him, to kill her younger brother and cast his limbs overboard to delay her father’s pursuit, and to attempt to win Jason the throne of Iolcos by persuading King Pelias’ daughters to kill their father, which actually gets the couple banished.  

In the course of the play itself, a version by Stella Duffy currently being staged at The Scoop amphitheatre near Tower Bridge, her anger at her lover choosing to marry another woman – Glauke, daughter of the King of Corinth, where he hopes to find refuge – eventually brings her to kill not only Glauke and Creon but also her two sons by Jason. Not quite content with this vengeance, she foretells to Jason his own death in the play’s final scene. Yet the truly disturbing feature of Euripides’ tragedy of disproportionate revenge is the degree to which Medea can seem a pitiable creature in the play’s opening scenes, her measured and rational argumentation contrasting with the other characters’ descriptions of her.

In Phil Willmott’s production, however, Medea (played by Siobhan O’Kelly) is a flurry of manic energy from the play’s outset, bursting on stage and flinging herself frantically from one side to the other of it. It’s rather exhausting to watch, in fact, and doesn’t allow an audience’s sympathy to develop, as it can in the best productions, for a woman abandoned in a foreign country by the man for whom she has given up everything. Medea’s description of the lot of a wife stuck in a loveless marriage and tied to the house is genuinely sad, which has even led some critics to claim Euripides for the feminist camp, but its force is lost amid the rushing about. The nurse’s outrage at Jason’s treatment of Medea does, in fairness, go a little way to putting this case, but it is tempered by her many grave warnings of her mistress’ nature. Medea’s elementality, then, is well conjured by O’Kelly, but is emphasised in this production at the expense of any initial humanity, making her acts shocking rather than tragic.

Also contributing to the loss of this facet to Medea’s character is the choice to make the chorus a news-hungry group of journalists, notepads in hand, meaning that any sympathy from them seems primarily a fish for quotations. The decision to make the chorus journalists does, however, integrate it into the play well, making its presence as a group convincing rather than an alien ancient relic. It also heightens one’s sense of the actors’ speeches as spin, a worry in ancient Athens as today: when put on the spot in front of cameras and asked to justify his actions, Jason’s (Joe Fredericks) initial hesitance but growing conviction in his refrain that he was “doing the right thing” depicts well his unpleasantly slippery character, a sophist in black tie. Creon (Raymond Coker), too, comes across as a politician eager to get his soundbite about protecting his people on the evening news.  

Both men are also casually misogynistic, but Medea’s ranting and raving makes their fear of her appear more rational than irrational. The play is at its most effective in scenes such as that in which the nurse (Ursula Mohan) describes the horrible revenge inflicted on Glauke and Creon, depicting powerfully an inner war between affection for her mistress and horror at her acts. For too much of this production, however, it remains a grim news story that horrifies but does not really involve.


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Tom Cameron