Euripides’ Medea, written 2,500 years ago, is a divorce drama with integral magic and witchcraft – as played in the current production at the National Theatre, London.
The pre-play platform discussion on August 12th described the difficulty and the intense intellectual and rehearsal effort that went into creating a living balance between the psychologically realistic and the other-worldly. ‘How do you fit witches into our more rational world?’ asked Carrie Cracknell, the director.
The response of Tom Scutt, the designer, was to draw on influences from 1970s horror films to provide visceral menace within an apparently recognisable domestic setting. His set did indeed offer a forested ‘stomach’, backstage centre, beneath a civilised brain, a smart dining room, all fronted by a broad, dated living room of anxious normality. We saw throughout, simultaneously, aspects of head and heart. The movement between them, particularly of Medea herself, and the hovering at the margins, was meaningfully directed.
The choreography of the Chorus was telling. The women of Colchis moved, spoke and sang as a fluid group, their restrained deportment punctured by dance of agonising psychotic twitches, flailing and writhing, all perfectly controlled. Bosch came to mind. As much as anything, this made us feel the impossibility of repressing the misery and anguish in the human condition of the play.
Medea is an outcast, a foreigner, a refugee, an abused wife, a mother. Helen McCrory makes her energy burst like solar flares, then suppresses it fiercely until her uncontrollable misery cracks open her public surface. Euripides’ text, the contemporary version by Ben Power, requires Medea to shift from despair to fury to devotion to machination with scarcely a beat between. Helen McCrory changes gear with the precision of a racing driver in full control. Her voice ranges from a low growl to a wheedle, motherly warmth to icy ferocity.
The surrounding characters were sound, and pushed the narrative on efficiently, prompting Medea onwards to the terror of her revenge on her husband, her decision to kill their sons. We were told of this awful journey, we were shown some of it, just beneath the surface of Medea’s skin, but in the end we were not terrified and awed by the monstrosity of the act, nor wept for pity at the final image of Medea, grunting beneath the eternal load of her dead sons, making her way into the creepy forest.
Showing both the realism of the human psychology and the ‘other’ worlds of magic, oaths and gods is hindered in this production by too much visual ‘telling’. The design constrains the imagination by being too explicit. The style of the playing (except the dance) is tilted to the domestic and familiar. Artistic expression that makes a true connection with audience, reader, viewer allows the responder to contribute and complete the creation imaginatively and thereby own the emotional impact of the result. It is very rare.
By being explicit and choosing action through domestic realism we lose the worst of the horrifying power of the human. Fundamentally, the human and the other are not two. The human contains, indeed creates, the other. Women and men make gods, not the other way around. The ‘magic’ in this play, references to Medea’s descent from the sun-gods, to her potency in medicines, even the murder of Kruesa by means of a poisonous cloak, is really a metaphor for the human power that controls and terrifies. Such power is so appalling that people have to push it away, pass it on in story, invent gods onto whom such power is projected, in order to absolve themselves of the responsibility for their own actions. In her final act, Medea is solely in charge. She decides to kill her sons to cause Jason utter pain and as an expression of her own desolation beyond any hope of being re-born. She controls and terrifies. In Medea the human and the other are one.