I must first apologise for the gap between this blog and the last. Since then, I’ve been working on my dissertation and performed in a production of Measure For Measure with the Shakespeare Institute Players, as one half of a re-imagined Provost made up of two twin brothers, thus christened ‘Brovost’ by myself and my co-star, Richard O’Brien. As a result, I’ve been pretty damn busy but on Wednesday saw the National Theatre’s current production of Euripides’s Medea, adapted by Ben Power, and starring the magnetic Helen McCory in the lead role. It’s prompted me to return, and ask how and why Power appeared to choose Lady Macbeth (a character twice portrayed by McCory) as the primary inspiration for his take on the great revenge heroine.
First of all, both this production and adaptation of Medea compared favourably with another update I saw in 2012, staged by Headlong and written by Mike Bartlett. Whilst that production was striking visually and possessed a fiercely contemporary Medea in Rachael Stirling, the modern references incorporated into the script felt both clunky and unnecessary. For instance, the opening monologue, delivered by ‘Pam’, began with her musing on how ‘I never really like the name Jason, it’s always made me think of Jason Donavan or that one from Take That.’ Such references took Medea‘s contemporary resonance as a domestic tragedy and, to an extent, trivialised it, meaning that the relation of the Greek epic to soap opera felt unbalanced. The adaptation also heavily focused on placing Medea in an increasingly secular world, having her admit after killing her child that ‘this morning I believed in God. I thought he gave us a house and world and happiness and life. But now I know there’s nothing.’ This transformed the tragedy into more one of ideology and lack of faith, meaning our focus was less trained on the terrible figure of Medea and her psychology, and more upon the modern world into which Headlong had translated her.
Ben Power redresses the balance between analysing Medea’s classical status and her ability to speak for our time in a subtler and more successful way. For a start, Helen McCory played the role with far more uncertainty at her actions than Stirling, marking the move from revenge to infanticide in a troubled and conscious way that drew both the audience’s horror and sympathy. Part of Power’s success where Bartlett failed was in utilising the key member of the Greek tragic structure, and its tradition, within the construction of his adaption: the audience. The play was bookended by speeches delivered to the audience by the Nurse character, which reflected on our foreknowledge of a story this infamous asking first, ‘I ask you / Who watch in darkness / Can there be any ending such as this?’ and ultimately reflecting at the end that ‘we are not subject to our own wills / Our own desires / But to the fates and fortunes / That the Gods hand to us.’ This achieved two important effects upon the audience. First of all, by deliberately involving us in the narrative and calling our attention to the inevitability of Medea’s actions, given their notoriety as a theatrical act, Power made us complicit in the act, almost daring an audience member to leap onstage and stop Medea fulfilling her bloody purpose. Secondly, more so than the 2012 production, it created a more interesting reflection on how modern audiences relate to the idea of Godly fate compared our Ancient Greek predecessors by arguably turning us into the Gods of our own destiny in this challenge to contemplate ‘how can there ever be any ending but this?’ In this way, Medea’s fate becomes our own and distinctly secular: ‘first silence / Then darkness.’
Medea’s key monologue in this production, prior to her killing her two sons, is the point at which I began to reflect how explicitly Power was referencing her relation to Lady Macbeth, rather than merely paying it lip-service. First seeing act of infanticide as a kindness, Medea justifies her actions by stating that:
‘I must take my children’s life.
Or leave them
And let someone else
Some crueller hand
Be their butcher.’
Here, she’s looking at it from what she believes to be a selfless standpoint – she’s literally being cruel to be kind. But then something extraordinary happens and in the moment of certainty, she flinches at the act:
‘Ah.
Still I hesitate!
Oh you pathetic
Weak-willed woman.
A devastated life stretches before me.
I must embrace the emptiness.’
Here, Power transforms that hesitancy into a strength for Medea and allows us to consider that, given even her contemplation of the act and for even thinking of killing her babies, she has already damned herself to ‘a devastated life’ and thus is resolved to carry out the act anyway. This is not dissimilar to an epissode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror which I watched recently, in which a Prime Minister, played by Rory Kinnear, who is faced with having to have sex with a pig on live television to ensure the release of a kidnapped princess, is told by his wife that, whether or not he chooses to do it, for the viewing public, ‘in their minds, you’re already doing it.’ This is Medea’s carpe diem moment, seizing the action ‘without a thought to who you are’ and is what makes her relatable to both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. She is so steeped in the blood of the imagined act that ‘returning were as tedious as go o’er.’
The specific line which calls the greatest attention to McCory’s Medea as a Lady Macbeth-figure is her urge to herself at this moment of internal conflict to ‘throw off your sex.’ The relation to ‘unsex me here’ is clear, but the act to which Medea is steeling herself for also recalls Lady Macbeth’s terrifying admission in Act 1 Scene 7 of Macbeth, in an attempt to get her husband to ‘man up’, that:
‘I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you
Have done this.’
She also tasks her husband with the similar demands that this Medea in Power’s adaptation makes to herself: to ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’ and remind him of his earlier remark to ‘feel now the future in the instant.’ Both point towards the bravery and nowness to be recognised in both Medea and Lady Macbeth’s actions and Power’s reference to Medea’s need to dispel both motherly instinct and womanly nature transforms her into a proto-Lady Macbeth, committing the act of infanticide only hinted at in Macbeth. Still more intriguing, I believe, is that his Medea reflects Freud’s idea that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ‘together […] exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype.’ As a result, Helen McCory played Medea as both revenge hero and a tragic, domestic figure and this, combined with Power’s ability to have her convey her moral dilemmas through internal monologue, framed her as part-Macbeth, part-Lady Macbeth. It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare would not have be influenced himself by Medea’s mystique when creating Lady Macbeth and Ben Power’s ability to have his modern Medea recall her is part of what gave this adaptation the perfect balance of classical and contemporary.
Not You Will 