Medea By Euripides. Adapted by Mike Bartlett Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow
Euripides was unique among the great Greek dramatists for showing sympathy to the subjugated, particularly women. Indeed, traditional audiences did not warm to Medea when it was first performed. But today, this undiluted tragedy of love, hatred, and madness provides fertile ground for this powerful new adaptation by Mike Bartlett.
In this modern Medea, the city of Corinth is swapped for an ordinary British street, the banality of which is juxtaposed against the play’s horrors. At first, terraced homes seem too small to contain Euripides’ explosive drama. But the portrayal of the volatile Medea (Rachael Stirling) as intelligent, witty, and even likeable provides a weighty emotional conflict. Her insights garner the ill-advised sympathy of the audience who experience Medea’s oppression and suffering acutely, even while recoiling from her psychological irrationality and murderous intent. Her convulsions of rage are well delivered by the shocking and oftentimes funny script.
Rather than forging triumph from victimhood, Euripides illustrated how it brutalizes the victim: Medea is not improved by her oppression, but corrupted by it. Betrayed by her husband Jason (Adam Levy) who leaves her for another woman, her mental health is devastated and she is engulfed by thoughts of violence, delusion, and despair. In a self-mutilation scene where she maims herself by reaching into boiling water (in full view of her son) the impression is of a mad witch’s lair, with seething cauldron and eerie atonal music accentuating a warped and dangerous mind.
Adam Levy and Rachael Stirling in Medea.
Photo: Manual Harlan
Medea brutally murders Jason’s new bride in a calculated act of savagery, recounted in frightening detail by Medea’s quavering friend Pam (Amelia Lowdell). Her retribution is most terrible for its premeditation, proving that despite brief moments of clarity and her denial of insanity, Medea’s decline has been inexorable. Her madness is not innate and indifferent, but borne out of a well-defined hatred. At the terrifying climax, self-harm and revenge coalesce into Medea’s final and most horrifying crime.
In Euripides’ original, the ‘mechane’ device was used to simulate Medea flying away deus ex machina in the chariot of the god Helios. At the close of this modern adaptation, Medea again surveys the theatre from above, atop the impressive stage setting of her ruined, smouldering home. Framed by a blood-red and almost Grecian sky, Medea cradles her son’s body with her shattered sanity fully displayed, a stark final flourish to conclude Bartlett’s successful and piercing translation of Euripides to the modern stage.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2012
