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Medea/Medea

Published Wednesday 24 June 2009 at 17:35 by Jason Best

Following Chris Goode’s radical reworking of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Gate last year, Irish performance artist Dylan Tighe is the latest director to deconstruct a classic text under the aegis of Headlong Theatre and the Gate’s New Directions scheme championing experimental approaches to classic plays.

Tighe’s subject is the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who resorted to murder and infanticide in terrifying acts of revenge after being abandoned by her lover Jason for a younger woman.

Deborah Warner, and her star Fiona Shaw, proved the Medea myth’s enduring theatrical potency at the start of the decade with a ferocious Abbey Theatre staging of Euripides’ great tragedy. They played things relatively straight, unlike Tighe, who attempts to reconstruct the myth as a multimedia performance, a mash-up of live and prerecorded image and music, found texts and found objects.

As with Goode’s Sisters, if you don’t know the original story inside out then you are likely to be hopelessly bewildered. In Tighe’s version, Helen Schoene’s inscrutable Medea concocts her deadly potion in a food mixer (one of a series of commonplace objects found hanging on a pegboard behind the performers), Richard Pepple’s army officer Jason blankly moves about the stage while an unseen voice recites the banal actions he is performing, Raad Rawi’s King Creon reads out passages from the British citizenship test and ends up draped with a union flag shroud, and Aine Stapleton’s Glauce, Jason’s new bride, experiences her death throes while wearing a horse’s head.

Elsewhere, banks of video monitors disgorge snatches of wartime speeches by Winston Churchill and gobbets of Barthesian semiotics while performers busy themselves with lightboxes.

Tighe’s approach inescapably recalls Katie Mitchell’s multimedia experiments, particularly her version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but whereas Mitchell’s radical stagings of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Women of Troy were underpinned by psychological realism, Tighe sticks determinedly to Brechtian alienation.

Mitchell’s effects don’t always come off, but when they do the drama is exhilarating and the contemporary resonances genuinely thought provoking. Poorly conceived and clumsily executed, Tighe’s staging falls well short of this. His aim is to unsettle the audience by exposing the “illusory nature” of their complacently held myths. He is more likely, however, to provoke fidgety boredom.

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