It is the second year of the New Directions award – set up by The Gate and Headlong Theatre to encourage bold new approaches to European classics – and awarded this year to Dylan Tighe for his Medea/Medea. Tighe’s directing is certainly distinctive and his intellectual curiosity cannot be faulted, but it is also out of control and at moments deeply self-indulgent. The overall effect is that of watching an annotated post-grad essay, which might ask some interesting questions of Euripides’ text, but hovers far, far above it.

The production starts promisingly: the actors are trapped behind a thin wire mesh and the stage decked out as a warehouse-cum-laboratory, with a bunch of ominous props hanging on the back-wall. An odd group of characters stands, silent and accusing – one naked woman faces the wall, a hooded man chomps down on a hard boiled egg, someone hides behind a copy of the Guardian and somewhere, somebody might be drowning, with their spluttering gurgles reverberating through the tiny Gate theatre.

If only it could have stayed like this – all eerie restraint, insinuation and confusion. But the show can’t stay still forever and the director and his new directions start to take over. Tighe opens up his box of tricks and scatters them everywhere – we get elaborate vignettes, prolonged silences, miming, moaning, birdsong, babies crying, manic laughter, the constant ping of a microwave and - in amongst all this – statements of intent from Tighe himself. The director speaks directly from two screens suspended on-stage: what is the meaning of myth; what is its relationship with democracy; do we have a responsibility to represent the everyman in myth and not just the bourgeoisie? But it isn’t enough just to state these points – one actually has to make them – and while Tighe knows what questions he wants to ask, his ethereal production cannot answer them.

Helen Scoene rises above the confusion; her Medea is impossible to laugh at, with a rock-hard will that has sunk into her fierce and beady eyes. She almost always faces the audience - willing us, goading us to do the impossible and intervene. Despite the snatch and grab nature of this show – one huge theme here, another stage-trick there, symbolism laid on thick one moment and crude imagery the next – Schoene’s (near silent) performance has a consistency and integrity to it. It might be impossible to tell what’s happening in this play of hers, but at least we can feel the anger and determination of her Medea.

This is a hard show to enjoy. It wants to do everything and forgets to do, well, something. As one truncated, dischordant moment chases the next, it gets impossible to trust the show and where it is taking us. One of the silliest moments comes when Medea ‘foreshadows’ the death of her two children; she removes a real fluttering budgie, which has been trapped on-stage throughout the show, leaves, returns with a fake budgie in a new cage and sets the whole thing on fire. It stinks. Not only of a burning, fake budgie, but also of a director who has resorted to trickery and gimmicks rather than creating real magic on-stage.

Till 18 July 2009