Horror through the eyes of babes
But sorcerer’s backstory is completely absent in new version, writes Emer O’Kelly
Medea
Gate Theatre Dublin
MOST children believe their own experience to be the norm, whether it be good or bad. And if their mother tells them she loves them, they’re inclined to believe it.
The legend of the witch Medea and her revenge on her faithless husband Jason has been told in many ways over the centuries; Medea has been given widely differing motives for murdering her two children, Jason’s sons.
She has been shown as hating them as the product of a love gone toxic; murdering them as the best way to inflict pain on Jason; even killing them to show her own successor in Jason’s bed that she still has power over him.
Australian writers Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks have upended the legend in their version of Medea told entirely from the little boys’ viewpoint, who see nothing but normality in their mother’s mood swings: it’s not the first time they have heard their parents arguing. Once it was when she objected to his long absence in search of the Golden Fleece and its powers. No different in their ears than the row over his leaving home to live with his “friend” instead of with their mother.
Grown-ups are incomprehensible when you’re eight and 10. But maybe when you’re 10 like Leon, something uneasy is beginning to dawn, and being locked in your bedroom all day, so long that your little brother Jasper wets his pants, it’s beginning to be disturbing.
But at least there’s plenty to do in that big attic bedroom filled with the toys of their growing stages, their imaginations have been fuelled since babyhood, even if Medea shouts furiously at them to clear up the mess.
That’s just Mum, just as it’s just Mum when she comes in to dress them in their best and gives them a “special” drink to sleep until Daddy comes for them… with his “friend”.
It’s a gentle murder in this version reminiscent of modern psychiatric explanations for twisted love that believes the world to be so evil that the children will be better out of it.
But then there’s the other side of Medea, for which you need to know the full legend. And here the version falls down.
Mulvany and Sarks do have Medea showing her boys the present she has wrapped to send to Daddy’s “friend”. The children don’t know and the audience has no way of finding out that this heartbroken and harassed woman has used her sorcerer’s powers to poison a wedding gown which will agonisingly burn to death its wearer, Jason’s new bride, as soon as she puts it on.
Yes, Medea is vengeful, one of the great monsters of legendary history without any human feeling other than savage hatred to which everything must be subject. (Her backstory includes having murdered her own family in order to elope with Jason.)
In her direction of the piece for the Gate, Oonagh Murphy opts for latter-day feminism: maybe we should “understand” Medea as a victim. And the wonderful Eileen Walsh makes it easy with her portrayal of every mood nuance. Then there are the children: enchanting, utterly absorbing and engaging in a world about to end for them. Oscar Butler and Jude Lynch are Leon and Jasper, (alternating with Elijah O’Sullivan and Luke O’Donoghue).
To watch them is perhaps the theatrical privilege of the year.
Alyson Cummins is responsible for the vividly realistic set, and the lighting, which incorporates a starlit night sky, is by Aedin
Cosgrove.