Theatre: Blueprint Medea
BLUEPRINT MEDEA Finborough Theatre/youtube (until 2nd September)
You all know the plot of Euripides's Medea, right?
Medea, Princess of Colchis, and wife to Jason (of Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame), mother to his children, gets the hump because he's ditching her for a fancy Corinthian princess, and so kills him and their children.
Julia Pascal, the veteran playwright and director, updated the play last year for a production at the Finborough Theatre, and now you can see it on Youtube.
Medea (Ruth D'silva) is an EX-PKK fighter for Kurdish freedom, who enters the UK on a dodgy passport (how she manages this, given that the passport is spotted as fake at the border, is not made clear). Working as a cleaner at a gym, she meets the young Iraqi British Jason (Max Rinehart), originally called Mohammed, who is doing the Knowledge.
They fall in love, despite her extremely rudimentary knowledge of English, and have twins. Then Jason's father (Tiran Aakel) puts the kibosh on the union and, after a brief struggle, persuades him to abandon Medea and marry his wealthy cousin, Glauke (Shaniaz Hama-ali).
The production is about as low-tech as you can get – be warned. And be forgiving, and grateful that the Finborough filmed this at all. They weren't to know, setting up their fixed single camera, that this would be the only way we'd be able to watch theatre.
But in a way it recreates the theatre experience quite well. Outside ambient noise trickles through, or at least I think it does; I'm assuming the police-car siren we heard was zooming down the road outside and not part of James Peter Moffatt's soundscape. But it could have been.
Later on, we get recorded sounds of emergency vehicles, but this time we are having a flashback to the chaos of Medea's past. At least I think we are. The scenery doesn't change, and at times the jumps between past and present – we get quite a few flashbacks – can be confusing. But then that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it embodies how past traumas can live on for ever. Let's call it ‘raw'.
Medea is a peach of a role: Sarah Bernhardt, Diana Rigg and Maria Callas have played her, and you can imagine how they would have handled it; Ruth D'silva, despite her military history, comes across as rather a drip – sweet and dignified, but still a drip – and you have to wait until the end before she gets her
revenge. Unlike in the original Euripides, you don't realise from the very outset that Medea is as mad as a wet hen at Jason's forthcoming nuptials and on the warpath.
‘A committed portrayal,' said one critic about D'silva's performance, which sounds a bit faint-praisey to me, commitment being one of the first things you might expect from an actor, as opposed to, say, wandering out of the theatre halfway through the play to meet a friend for a light meal.
Pascal ticks a few boxes, such as the plight of the modern asylum-seeker, the patriarchal nature of Muslim families and the whole rat's nest of antagonisms in the Middle East. But these seem perfunctorily addressed, and one is left asking questions such as what does Medea bring to the story of the PKK, or of asylum-seekers? And what do the PKK, and asylumseekers, bring to the story of Medea?
I'm struggling with this, to be honest. Well, you wouldn't want to mess with either Medea or a Kurdish freedom fighter. That's about the only point of contact I can think of.
Oh, there are others, but they feel a bit shoehorned in: Pascal's Medea's grandfather is called a ‘king', but I suspect the term is used more as an honorific than an actual title; and she's also a dab hand with unguents. The scene in which she kills her rival, Glauke, is a little confusing. For a while, I wondered whether they were going to run off together to form a lesbian collective – there is some business where
Medea teaches her how to ‘relax' so that losing her virginity will be pleasurable.
‘I've never felt this way before,' says Glauke in a dreamy, sexy way, which I gather from internet research is the kind of thing that gets said on such occasions, but, shortly after that, she is killed. How, exactly, is a little vague, unless you know your Euripides.
‘What have you done?' she cries, and, frankly, I'm not entirely sure myself. The murder of the twins is represented by Medea screwing up two pieces of paper each bearing the picture of an infant and making a face. I don't think Sarah Bernhardt would have done it like that.