Heiner Muller's Medea Material
Peter Falkenberg, dir.
(Free Theatre/UniversitY of Canterbury Drama
Programme)
University Theatre, Christchurch
10-28 October, 1995
Reviewed by Elizabeth O'Connor
This show is a great explication of why we're still
watching Medea, or versions thereof, 2,000-plus years
after Euripides. Heiner-Müller's piece is pessimistically
post-modern but constitutes a powerful, bleak unmasking
of the sexual archetype and conflict, a credit to the
intellectual and imaginative explorations of the Drama
Programme staff and students.
One must know the Medea story well to appreciate
both the electric moments and the langours of this
production. This is concept-driven theatre, where the
everyday and audience expectations are stripped away by
aesthetic high-handedness, and the actor's humanity exists
only in service to the idea and the machinery of the
production.
At times the performers are over-extended, or
over-indulgent. The five Jasons are generally less
prepossessing and convincing than the five Medeas;
whether this is a cultural accident or a conscious choice, I
wonder if it does not jeopardize the argument of the piece.
Direct address to the audience was by turns startling,
alarming or cringe-inducing, but cold and unengaging.
In general, however, less than perfect execution
did not distract from the terrific and admirable
intensity these performers achieved. In general they
fulfilled their tasks; in particular Greta Bond gave an
intelligent and charged performance.
Crowded and nudged into forced intimacy with the
images created, the audience became (along with the
Jasons) at once participants and voyeurs in a show
which veered from Berlin nightclub decadence to
Wagnerian grand gesture. The Teutonic flavour
befitted both author and director, and the arrogant
European focus of the production generated the most
striking show I have seen in the Free/University
Theatre since Falkenberg's 1984 eleven years ago.
There was a point at which I wished the show
would end: the post-holocaust placement of drowned
men on the sea floor, anchored by barnacle sirens.
From then on, the stages were laboured and subdued.
Men conceptualizing while women groped them from
the floor, Gee what it takes to shut men up, even
underwater, yes, but we've got that. What next? A
nineties non-communicative nightclub. Well, I said it
was pessimistic post-modern. But brave, and bravo.