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10-21 October 1995, University Theatre, The Arts Centre
21-23 March 1996, Escape Nightclub, Wellington, Wellington Fringe Festival Four years ago FREE THEATRE's production of Heiner Müller's HAMLETMACHINE was a great audience success. Its provocative combination of avant-garde experimentation and alternative theatre made it a theatrical highlight of 1991. Now FREE THEATRE again brings Heiner Müller's work to Christchurch. MEDEAMATERIAL is a daring theatrical re-interpretation of the MEDEAs of Euripides and Seneca, a postmodern collage that infuses the classics with the style and feeling of T.S. Eliot's WASTE LAND.
MEDEAMATERIAL reunites four collaborators from HAMLETMACHINE: Peter Falkenberg, who produced the 1991 production, directs MEDEAMATERIAL. Mark McEntyre, one of the Hamlets, has designed the set. Helen Moran, who played Ophelia/Elektra, will be one of the Medeas. And Bryan Lacey again acts as production manager and lighting designer. Lawrence Wallen, a video installation artist and long-time collaborator with FREE THEATRE, joins with Mark McEntyre in designing a provocative environmental set and is also incorporating aspects of electronic theatre into MEDEAMATERIAL. 
For his version of MEDEA, Müller has interwoven intensely condensed fragments of the Euripides and Seneca play texts with pieces of dreams, automatic writing and free associations of modern landscapes with mythical scenes. The resulting text, originally written over a period dating from the l950s to the 1980s, consists of three parts: DESPOILED SHORE, MEDEAMATERIAL, and LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS. The FREE THEATRE production has added Müller's MEDEA PLAY, a mime, to this trilogy.
Audiences who remember this year's production of Euripides' MEDEA at the Court Theatre may very well be interested to see a completely different attempt to modernise the familiar myth. As in HAMLETMACHINE, Müller has not simply adapted the older play for contemporary audiences; rather he has radically re- interpreted the original story for the end of the 20th century. Müller reads the story of Jason and Medea as the earliest myth of colonisation in Greek legend. He says: "The end signifies the threshold where myth turns into history: Jason is slain by his boat... European history began with colonisation... That the vehicle of colonisation strikes the coloniser dead anticipates the end of it. That's the threat of the end we're facing, the 'end of growth'." The beginning of European 'civilisation' may also be seen as marked by the colonisation of woman. Medea is the matriarch, a barbarian and sorceress, a specialist in love potions and poisons. She represents the male fear of Woman. She denies him his status as father by killing his male offspring. In rejecting the role of the mother as the agent of the perpetual reproduction of the existing order, Medea re-defines herself as negation: "I / No woman and no man." For Müller, the dominant male order is ultimately self-destructive. Medea as the woman who tears apart the foundation of Western civilisation, paradoxically, represents a hope for our survival in the future. In MEDEAMATERIAL Müller provides a theatrical text that, like its subject, transgresses the patriarchal values of rationality and order. It remains 'material' which is not yet 'colonised.' The FREE THEATRE presents MEDEAMATERIAL as a theatrical landscape, resembling a night club with a bar and contemporary music to dance to, and with additional peep show attractions. 
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.... What next? A nineties non-communicative nightclub. Well, I said it was pessimistic post-modern. But brave, and bravo. 
Work as adventurous, rigorous and uncompromising as this redefines what is possible in theatre - and makes us, if we are alive to it, re-examine our entire theatrical world-view. 
What I saw in the nightclub was yet another example of the solemnity, the repetition, the slowness and the emotional coldness of contemporary "experimental" theatre. Articles
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“The only idea that we have about the world is markets now. Markets, growth and so on. And this growth in the end will kill us. That’s basically in the background of the [Jason and the Argonauts] myth as Müller interprets it. And he also interprets it in terms of man colonizing woman and woman hitting back… He [Müller] says the only thing which a work of art can do is awaken a kind of desire for another state of the world and this desire is revolutionary and anything that commercialised, industrialised art does is in fact kill desire because it is in the interest of the powers that are that there is no revolution.... Heiner Müller says theatre is a dialogue between bodies and not between talking heads… the relationship between the bodies to each other are the real theatrical force in this production I hope” 
ReviewsIt is not often that I am stuck for words. But in describing "Medea Material" I cannot find the language adequate to the experience. It bears as much relationship to what passes for theatre here as chess does to snakes and ladders.... Falkenberg has, once again, set a standard of brilliant imaginative theatre which others can only dream of attaining. But if only they would just dream of it. 
You could say it's a tale of two cities: Christchurch, home of the highly successful but seldom risk-taking Court Theatre, and Christchurch, home of the experimental and innovative Free Theatre. 
Gradually, we began to realise that if we wanted to see any more, we had to follow the actors, and like sheep nervous about entering an unknown pasture, we stood up.... While I don't think I personally gained any great new insight into the Medea myth, I found this "dramatic palimpsest" to be a potpourri of unique theatrical experiences... Like a typical kiwi bloke, I said nothing and got out of the room. 
I'm tired of sitting in trendy cafes after similar avant-garde performances too scared to admit to my beret-clad Bohemian buddies that the thing I liked best about the show was the blonde in the second row (third from left).... the point of yet another highly stylised dance multi-media extravaganza was lost on a pleb like me. 
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Media Material - From the Free Theatre
CANTA, Issue 23, 11 October 1995 Audience joins cast in Medea production The Press, 18 October 1995 Radical new staging of Greek myth Jocelyn Johnstone, The Star, 18 October 1995 Medea myth brought to life as tale for 1990s Dominion, 8 February 1996 Last time for an off-beat cut publication unspecified, Thursday 21 March 1996 |
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