February 4, 2010
Northern Broadsides must be finding themselves a victim of their own success, with Lenny Henry’s Othello playing to packed houses in the West End, and now Tom Paulin’s Medea, which heads from the stage of the Playhouse to a national tour. This new version provides one with, and trades upon, so many archetypes and parallels, so many allusions and confluences, it is difficult to know where to begin. But with Paulin on record saying he has tasked himself with providing a soundscape in which the sentence is paramount, there is much here to suggest the aim’s been achieved and bettered.
Mixing the West Riding with Ancient Greece, and an exotic/Barbarian otherness played out by a Black British actress, Barrie Rutter’s production gives us Medea as the first Mrs Rochester crossed with Richard III. In Paulin’s semi-vernacular verse, Yorkshire is transposed to somewhere else that may just be the London of the accents of Medea and her nurse, but has the potential to be Africa, the Caribbean, or just about anywhere beyond the Humber or the Pennines. Medea, most celebrated of barbarian is described in this version as an immigrant, and her deeds are a reluctance to let her status as a foreigner make her a passive victim of Greek mores once brought to the ‘locks and quays’ (or might it be ‘locks and keys’?) of the Hellespont. We are not allowed to forget she is an exile, a stateless person, a refugee.
The set presents us with a structure that is nothing more than the Golden Fleece clinging to the rotting ribcage of the ram, above a floor bedecked with skins of ostensibly sacrificed beasts, Northern Broadsides’ typical sparseness is here given a bestial and gory spin. The whole myth of Jason and his Argonauts is thought to find its origins in Greek citizens’ desires to find themselves heroic ancestors, and the grizzly conclusion of Jason’s story here reminds us that we must, as Medea entreats us, judge her as a proud woman, and not merely as a barbarian.
Nina Kristofferson plays Medea as a wild, angry woman whom it is possible to get inside. She screams, she thrashes, she ululates. Her chorus, who with multiple instruments and voice also provide the play’s music, are the matrons of Corinth, and do what they need to wonderfully, with their solo, duo and trio parts providing the voice of sympathy as well as conscience. As Jason, Andrew Potter is gorgeous, powerful, and convincing in being finally brought to his knees. The flattest performance is unfortunately given by the play’s director and company Artistic Director Barrie Rutter whose turn as Jason’s servant is despairing and gripping, in contrast with his earlier appearance as the bowler-hatted King Creon of Corinth that finds him stagy and tripping over his lines.
Mixing the West Riding with Ancient Greece, and an exotic/Barbarian otherness played out by a Black British actress, Barrie Rutter’s production gives us Medea as the first Mrs Rochester crossed with Richard III. In Paulin’s semi-vernacular verse, Yorkshire is transposed to somewhere else that may just be the London of the accents of Medea and her nurse, but has the potential to be Africa, the Caribbean, or just about anywhere beyond the Humber or the Pennines. Medea, most celebrated of barbarian is described in this version as an immigrant, and her deeds are a reluctance to let her status as a foreigner make her a passive victim of Greek mores once brought to the ‘locks and quays’ (or might it be ‘locks and keys’?) of the Hellespont. We are not allowed to forget she is an exile, a stateless person, a refugee.
The set presents us with a structure that is nothing more than the Golden Fleece clinging to the rotting ribcage of the ram, above a floor bedecked with skins of ostensibly sacrificed beasts, Northern Broadsides’ typical sparseness is here given a bestial and gory spin. The whole myth of Jason and his Argonauts is thought to find its origins in Greek citizens’ desires to find themselves heroic ancestors, and the grizzly conclusion of Jason’s story here reminds us that we must, as Medea entreats us, judge her as a proud woman, and not merely as a barbarian.
Nina Kristofferson plays Medea as a wild, angry woman whom it is possible to get inside. She screams, she thrashes, she ululates. Her chorus, who with multiple instruments and voice also provide the play’s music, are the matrons of Corinth, and do what they need to wonderfully, with their solo, duo and trio parts providing the voice of sympathy as well as conscience. As Jason, Andrew Potter is gorgeous, powerful, and convincing in being finally brought to his knees. The flattest performance is unfortunately given by the play’s director and company Artistic Director Barrie Rutter whose turn as Jason’s servant is despairing and gripping, in contrast with his earlier appearance as the bowler-hatted King Creon of Corinth that finds him stagy and tripping over his lines.