Mess with murderous Medea at your peril
Medea (The Hub, International Festival)
Verdict: Blood, sweat and tears ★★★★☆
THE most visceral and gut-wrenching performance at this year’s International Festival is surely Michael Boyd’s revival of Euripides’s ancient Greek tragedy, adapted in 2000 by Scotland’s leading laureate Liz Lochhead.
Be warned, though, this is a broadside from antiquity in which the scorned wife of Jason (he of the Argonauts) decides to take revenge on her husband by butchering their children.
As a black woman with an English accent, Adura Onashile’s Medea is spurned by the white, Scots-accented Greeks, after Jason decides to ditch her as his wife and marry instead the daughter of Creon, King of Thebes.
Medea is especially bitter, because she helped Jason make his name on his legendary expedition to procure the Golden Fleece.
Resolving to kill her children ‘to prove her love’, the logic of Medea’s position in
Lochhead’s adaptation is not always watertight. But what is undeniable is the brilliance of Onashile’s ferocious performance. Thoughtful, wily and tender, too, she has an impressive vocal technique, pitching and spinning her lines like weapons. What is perhaps missing from Lochhead’s earthy, feminist account peppered with four- letter salvos, is the way Euripides makes the infanticide seem inevitable.
Onashile brings the physique of an Olympic athlete and the poise of Grace Jones to her Medea, while Boyd matches her gutsy performance with an elemental production set on a catwalk backed by rusting iron girders. Gongs and tubular bells are struck, periodically, to add a sense of percussive doom.
A chorus of Glaswegian ‘women of all time’ mingle in the audience to offer sisterly solidarity and rueful Scots humour, as well as pleas for Medea to show restraint.
Also impressive is Robert Jack as Jason, whose voice of peat smoke and whisky collapses into grief when he pays dearly for discarding his children’s mother.
By the way, this is a so- called ‘promenade’ production, which means you’re on your feet ( with only a smattering of seats for those who need them) for 80 minutes in this venue’s sweltering heat.
It’s a testament to the show’s power that I barely noticed.