The most obvious thing about Dylan Tighe’s adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy is that you do not see this kind of theatre often in London. When you do, it is usually at an international fringe-ish festival, like the SPILL, and the result, as in the case of Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso at the 2009 SPILL, tends to involve people walking out even just a few minutes into the show, and, more often than not, in an uproar among the critics at the terrible insult of having been bored. And yet this is a real shame, because Medea/Medea is a beautiful work, and a work that clearly wants to speak to its audience, not to alienate it. So much has been said about the myth of Medea that one does not quite know where to start from in interpreting it; the list of adaptations, transformations, theories and essays is endless. Medea/Medea works as a phantasmagorical recap on a, yes, arbitrary, but not random or selfishly idiosyncratic selection of some of the things that have been made of Euripides’ text.

We start the evening facing a black metallic veil that separates us from the action for most of the play; behind the (almost mute) actors, who will rarely share the stage after the opening scene, a wall, hanging from which are, among other things, child mannequins and a canary and a very ugly looking knife and a mirror. Medea, played by Helen Schoene with a force and a determination that make her seem an incandescent, terrifying statue, is wearing what might or might not be Muslim attire, a scarf covering her head and neck, perhaps a suggestion of her barbarity, in the very Greek sense of the word. Medea was a princess in her own country, Colchide (what today would roughly be Georgia, a geographical location coincidentally still dense with meaning), but, in Corinth, she was an immigrant, and on top of that a woman, hence an absolute nobody once her husband decided to cast her away. Worthless, devoid of rights.

From two screens on the top corners of the back wall, Tighe reads out selections from Roland Barthes and Pierpaolo Pasolini. At times, we hear parts of speeches by Churchill. Raad Rawi, playing Creon, reads out selections of a guidebook to the UK citizenship test. Jason shouts ‘God is great!’, while his new, young, blonde wife is mute - but mute with a silence much less determined, much less powerful than Medea’s, a muteness that becomes complete identification with her husband as his monstrous, bestial identity absorbs hers. And it is only Medea, on the other hand, who speaks the myth, whose words translate into Euripides’ lines running on an LED screen, while she mixes bleach and washing powder in a blender and rapidly consoles one of her children for the graze on her knee.

The production is definitely referencing Lars Von Trier’s Medea, and quite possibly Heiner Müller’s Despoiled Shore Medea - Material Landscape for Argonauts. It is brimming with significance and open to questioning and personal projection (yes, you really need to choose, but it is somehow exhilarating to be offered so many possible answers); it is also, quite clearly, drenched in Tighe’s passion for this myth and in his interest in Myth in general: semiotics, symbols, and the unstoppable layering of meanings that risk making a still surprising text like Euripides’ original Medea mummify, and eventually get lost in interpretation, unless it is occasionally de-mystified and taken apart.

Medea/Medea is undoubtedly a slow play by London standards, and it will annoy some of the audience. But it is regrettable that, in comparison to much of the European audience, the British should still appear so firmly set, a priori, against slowness and silence and anything that can be called, generalising for practical purposes, experimental theatre. There are no linear conclusions to be drawn from Tighe’s adaptation, but there is a very stimulating invitation to make your own way into the text. The sounds, the visual impact (also thanks to Chahine Yavroyan’s suggestive lighting), even the smells are enthralling. Don’t let the pace put you off, and you might be surprised at just how much you like it.

Till 18 July 2009