Audiences composed predominantly of
school and college students can serve as interesting bellwethers: they
may not be as nuanced in their responses as more accustomed
theatregoers, but they are seldom downright wrong
per se. So I felt it to be when
watching the first leg of Northern Broadsides’ latest touring
production in Oxford in a house where I may have been the oldest
non-teacher present.
Poet and critic Tom Paulin has written a translation of Euripides that
is mostly unadorned demotic speech, suited to the Broadsides’ policy of
presenting classics in a blunt Yorkshire voice; however, the effect can
sometimes be bathetic, as when Medea, having murdered Jason’s new
bride-to-be, King Creon of Corinth and her own two sons by Jason and
about to be spirited away in an airborne chariot, climaxes her final
triumphant speech to him with, “Fuck off!” In terms of finding a
musical idiom for the choric sequences and incantations, director
Barrie Rutter has definitely hit upon something by opting for the
blues; yet the young audience could not but suppress a titter or two
when the three-strong chorus of Corinthian women (with Yorkshire
accents) began blowing blues harmonicas. It may not be
that universal a language.
The story of Medea has fascinated artists in all media down the ages,
but particularly through the past century and a half since ideas of
women’s autonomy began to take hold. We feel ambivalence towards the
character, admiring her for daring to assert herself whilst deploring
the bloody manner in which she does so. In the role here, black
actress/singer Nina Kristofferson (delivering her lines with a slight
Caribbean accent to underscore Medea’s status as an outsider in Greece)
has a ramrod back, remaining defiantly upright even at her most
impassioned. Unfortunately, she does a lot of being impassioned. Medea
is not the subtlest of roles, but it does call for dramatic range;
Kristofferson tends to restrict herself to a few discrete notes, mostly
towards the high end. Several times she begins a set-piece speech at a
shout and builds up from there to a shriek. Rutter’s production is an
efficient rendering (and at 85 minutes or so a sprightly one), but
given the perennial popularity of the theme it will surely not be long
before another and a better one comes along.
Written for the Financial
Times.