March 16, 2001: Euripides, Medea
Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, directed by Deborah Warner
A decree has gone out from Her Majesty’s Stationers Offices banishing all stationers from the theatre district. I was hoping to buy a new notebook there for writing about the London theatre, and still may; but for now I commit a few back pages of another notebook to this pressing and very pleasurable task.
Arrived in London, solo this time, early in the morning of Thursday, March 15, staying in a flat that a companion and I have rented several times over the past few years, in Endell Street, Covent Garden. Drury Lane parallels it running north, a turning or two to the east, and it is situated just around the corner from the Covent Garden tube station, from which only a few minutes’ walk southeast takes you to the Royal Opera House (and Drury Lane Theatre, for that matter) or, a few minutes west, past the Garrick Club to the many theatres of the West End.
I was in one of those theatres tonight — the Queen’s, on Shaftesbury Avenue, near the top of Wardour Street — to see Fiona Shaw in a new production (and new translation) of Euripides’ Medea, directed by Deborah Warner. It is the most horrific myth in western literature, the story of Medea’s colossal retribution for all the deep wrongs she has suffered at the hands of Jason, her faithless husband, and the world at large — that retribution being the quadruple murder of Jason’s new bride, the Princess of Corinth, her father Kreon, and the two small children that she shares with Jason. It reads as simultaneously vindication and profound self-destruction on Medea’s part.
This production of Warner’s leaves no depth of indignity unvisited. We are in a post-modern Corinth, a near-derelict city, where monolithic glass walls and opaque glass sliders have been constructed in the bleak surround created by the unlovely walls of the stage itself. In the center, a shallow wading pool; nearby, cinder blocks piled up as if for use in new construction, but their presence only serves to emphasize the desolation of the place. High on the back wall of the stage an undulating reflection, seemingly more organic and living, seems to remind us of the proximity of the sea, and of the voyagers, Jason and Medea, who have fled one dysfunctional civilization for another. The chorus of Corinthian women, seven in number, young or middle-aged, dressed in the miscellaneous near-grunge that passes for everyday dress in modern cities, whose inhabitants are hard-pressed to make a go of it but are nevertheless subject to the pressures of funk fashion such as vibrant purple hair. Placed among the nondescript, ordinary but soon deeply engaged local citizens, Fiona Shaw’s Medea, in her simple sleeveless black dress and incongruous orange cardigan, seems both to tower above them and to allow connection with them.
This is a stunning, harrowing production. The audience is held in the iron grip of a remorseless action that rises and rise