MEDEA
(indian adaptation of the greek classic)
Design
and Direction : Chandradasan
Text:
by Euripides
Translation:
Puthussery Ramachandran
Music : Bijibal M
Light Design: Jayaprakash
Duration of the play: 55 mts.
Euripides’s Medea (BC 431) is a timeless ancient tragedy and remains
contemporary and universal, through the ages.. Medea is the image and
representative of the female who had been victimized my male authoritarianism
through generations, and is highlighting the inadequacies of the socio
linguistic distinctions between man and woman. In Greek mythology Medea
was princess of colchis; she was the grand daughter of Helios the sun
God, who had affinities with magic, and priestess of Hecate; out of
love, Medea helped Jason to steal the Golden Fleece from her father,
even dismembering her brother to delay her lover’s pursuers. He
swore special reciprocal obligations to her by their right hands, a
binding oath guaranteed by the gods.
When the play opens Jason has decided to marry Glauke, the daughter
of the King Creon of Corinth, and thus to improve his social standing.
Medea and her children are expatriated, without even a family she could
return to.
Medea is shown at the beginning, as a typical suffering woman who is
mourning, - which is appropriate to Greek women’s confinement
to the inner reaches of the house. Then she announces that she is coming
out of the house to address the women of the area, identification by
the Medea, and the audience. Later Creon confirms his orders of her
banishment, calls her cunning with vengeance brewing within her; however
he does not want to play the tyrant and Medea persuades him to allow
her to remain in Corinth until down the next day.
The quarrel between Medea and Jason is the focus of the play. The arguments
range from despair to flippancy, from savagery to debating reasonably.
Jason’s nature is revealed during this to be a selfish traitor.
Jason argues that he does not go for the second marriage out of passion
or lust, but since it will help him to regain power. When Jason is a
power seeker, Medea is longing for love and caring. Medea has abandoned
her own culture, her native land, parents, and the family as a sacrifice
for her love towards Jason. Medea comes from a somewhat tribal nativity
where sophistication is not the standards. She does not know to “well
behave and speak to with a soft tongue”. Her culture and race
is primitive and Jason blames her many times for this. But the ‘uncivilized
’Medea can not accept nor understand Jason’s argument for
his second marriage and Jason has all the skills to argue out in his
favor. This may raise many questions regarding the concepts and definitions
of civilizations, primitiveness, ethics and morality.
“Now water flows uphill. Injustice marks itself. Betrayal rules;
a woman is too weak, too scared to fight. But wrong her in the marriage
bed, and she will have your blood”. The sorcerer in Medea is slowly
reborn when she finds out that, the only action she has to perform is
to grow as a demigoddess and revenge against the likes of Jason.
Aegius and old friend of Medea, a simple, stupid, shortsighted, egoist
gentleman arrives on the scene, wanting to father a son. Medea offers
to help him with progeny if he offers her sanctuary when she leaves
Corinth. Medea plays on his credulity like a vamp.
She asks her children to take the poisoned ancient gifts to Glauke and
she accepts the gift and is eventually killed along with Creon. Soon
after the servant brings the news, Medea goes into the room and there
kills her own child to complete the revenge to Jason. The fire and the
sun inside spirit come out as visible metaphors to complete this act.
At the end of the play, the Sun God’s dragon _ drawn chariot arrives
to whisk Medea and her son’s remains. She refuses to allow Jason
to bury them – instead she takes the bodies with her so that she,
their mother who nurtured and killed them can properly prepare them
for burial. She takes her bleeding, lifeless children in her arms and
carries them up to her “door” and she slams it with all
of Corinth in flame and ashes and Jason a middle-aged shell of man with
no ship, no wife, no children left with, just emptiness around him.
Jason is blind with rage and once comes across as the victim when he
laments” unholy vile woman, let me touch them, hold them”.
Medea is lifted gradually with the mundane to the heights of a Devi,
a semi goddess during the development of the ply. Thus the performance
structure and acting process depends and derives from many rituals and
dances of Indian tradition, in its spirit. So that, the act of Medea,
killing her sons will be watched with a shrilled reverence. The performance
invokes the ‘Sun’ in her, and let her ablaze with the fire
of divine vengeance.
The transformation of the
character of Medea from a sweet loveable lady, to the sorceress, to
that lover who could sacrifice her relatives, her own land and culture,
to that housewife who suffers and keeps everything within her and then
finally to that ’semi divine angry Devi-the grand child of Sun
God seated in a floating and elevated fire chariot – whom Jason
or other mortals cannot touch induces horrified empathetic passion,
transcends time and space to touch the contemporary female existence.
The tragedy of Medea is particular and the same time general to the
female gender. Her vengeance arouses from intense human passions that
touch ecstasy. She refuses to follow the norms of her gender, repudiating
the very grace and charms that is expected of a female. ‘Medea’
would have been simply the story of many a female in generations gone
past and in future.
The performance is poetic and looks into the inner psyche but it also
invoke and extract the high voltage of energy, derived from high human
passion. The sun, the atmosphere of black magic, the ritualistic atmosphere
and tribal culture of Medea will add to his experience Euripides has
used the plot as a representation of the socio political instabilities
in that era, to extract an alchemy where the super natural or the metaphysical
become the earthy and mundane reality of human life.
This production is an encounter of the Indian theatre with the Greek
in its narrative structure, technique that is modern as well as traditional
at the same time. .
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