A Symposium on Medea

FIONA SHAW AS MEDEA Photo courtesy of the University Musical Society University of Michigan

Last fall the Abbey Theatre of Ireland's acclaimed production of Euripides' Medea came to the University of Michigan. On October 18, 2002, a symposium about the play and the production convened in which distinguished scholars on the faculty of the university asked questions of the play's director, Deborah Warner, and the lead actress, Fiona Shaw. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of the conversation. Yopi be Prins, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, moderates the panel, whose members include Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (Classics), Linda Gregerson (English), Katherine Mendeloff (Drama, Residential College), and Ruth Scodel (Classics). The panel was co-sponsored by the University Musical Society and by "Contexts for Classics," a faculty consortium recently formed at the University of Michigan to explore past, present, and future contexts for Classical studies. MQR is grateful to Warren Williams, of the University Musical Society, and to Claire Malloy, for their assistance in preparing the text and photographs for publication.

 
katherine mendeloff: As someone who has worked with adapting and modernizing Classical translations, I had a question for Deborah specifically about one of the most difficult challenges a director faces when encountering this work and trying to make it contemporary and relevant for a modern audience: what to do with the chorus? Because the Greek chorus obviously had its own function in its time. I want to ask you, Deborah, about your conception of the chorus and the choice to make them individuals rather than a mass. Would you speak some more about what you want the audience to learn from the choices you made?

 
deborah warner: Well, I think that one always has another production playing in one's mind as well as the play that one has made, and it has always been a source of inspiration to me to think what would happen if one could have a chorus of 500 or 600 women. Now there are certain problems involved in that, and even this well-endowed university might not have been able to afford to bring that particular production here, but it has always rather haunted me because this notion, that "the women" of a town and in this case Corinth arrive, is a rather extraordinary notion. And truly, if 600 of the local women were prepared to sit on the lawn outside Medea's house, you would have the most astonishing situation, Greenham Common revisited, or whatever great female protest there might be, and it would make the playing of the scenes terribly exciting and very challenging: Jason arriving and having to break through 600 women who are now camping outside his house. So that's the one I haven't done, but I think that's a very good option for the film should it ever be made.

I've only ever tackled two Greek tragedies, Elektra with Fiona almost ten years before this. And what happened when I came to Medea was that I had the courage to be more individual in terms of the characterization of each of these women than I had ten years before. I was convinced that making the chorus into individuals wouldn't work ten years ago. I do believe it's worked very, very well with this particular production, and for those of you who haven't seen it there are not 600 of them, there are just five. We began with eight, in fact, and this production has had three stages to its life and we've now gone down to five, which does work for the group of actresses better. What we have done is break their texts down into individual roles, which we know very well is not how these dramas were initially approached. But our perception that the chorus are so profoundly part of this drama that they actually provide an emotional musical score for the evening helped us understand this extraordinarily difficult journey that we are being asked to follow. And having had three choruses now, the first of which I must say were very weak, and the second which were a little better, and the third which are very strong now, I do know that Fiona's work is made much more possible by a certain burden being taken off. The chorus are throwing enormous light, they're not commenting, they are somehow sometimes explaining moments to us. And where they did have a rhythmic and musical place once upon a time at the start of tragedy, I think that we've recreated that effect again; somehow they are the heartbeat underneath this play. They work much harder than you may see, and when they are not working as hard as this, the production absolutely flops and falls and dies.

 
katherine mendeloff: I had the chance to speak with the people in the chorus after the performance on Wednesday night, and one thing that they brought up to me was the idea of paparazzi, the people who are attracted to celebrities, autograph hunters, that sort of thing, and even the eating of the crisps came directly from an event when someone came to a funeral with potato chips. I was thinking of the role of the paparazzi in Princess Diana's death, for example, because they brought up Princess Diana as an example of someone of that kind of size and people wanted to be around her and actually their voracious interest in her was the cause of her destruction. But there is a question that you dealt with really beautifully in a non-verbal way, which is that these are women of Corinth and they identify with Medea as a woman, but that she destroys their society. To some degree they collude with Medea on the killing of the princess, even though the princess is going to continue their royal line. So when the messenger came in and gave the speech about the princess's death they were each of them in her own way traumatized by her complicity in the death. It's a very rich choice that you've made about how people change from being observers to being actors in an event bigger then they are.

 
deborah warner: We know that Medea is an extremely famous figure in the world. There is only one question about a Greek chorus and that is why they turn up. I can assure you that when we made Elektra it took me three weeks' work to try and discover why they turned up. It's very, very problematic. And were I to go back to that production, I'd have to concede now that, of course, Elektra is famous too. She's so wrecked and so lost in her grief that onetempted to feel that people may have forgotten about her, but she's a very powerful man's daughter and people will know who she is. So Medea is an easier play for moving into due to the fact that there's two immensely famous giants of the world living up in this house and people are likely to come and visit and gawk at them, but I don't suspect that the chorus have ever been there before.

 
yopie prins: Fiona, do you have any thoughts on interacting with the chorus as part of your performance?

 
fiona shaw: I can understand anybody approaching the play having difficulty with the chorus, and the chorus themselves having difficulty with what they have to do, which is to follow the argument, sometimes contradict the argument, sometimes accept the argument, which is probably very like what the audience is going through. There is a wonderful line where they suddenly feel very sorry for Glauke, that she just happened to be the king's daughter. So they're in a very, very difficult position. As an actress I am entirely dependent on them; what Deborah says is correct. One of them, particularly, is an absolute inspiration, the energy! She whacks into it. If I'm in difficulty she sort of sends electricity. Just pow! And of course they are terribly tired, as I am, at the end of the play, because we do it without an intermission. The hour and a half is exactly the length that you can endure this play. Between performances the chorus are all out having massages and saunas trying to undo the tension. The performance functions from tension, it doesn't function from ease. It's something to do with the Greek chorus being much nearer an operatic chorus where music was able to release the performers from the buildup of energy. If you take away the music, in a way the actors have to write their own music, and it's much harder both for them and for the director to conduct it.

 
deborah warner: And I would add, for what it's worth, that this particular actor that's just been mentioned did everything in her power to not be cast this time round. And when I asked why, she said look, it's terribly difficult for the chorus because they have no release at the end of the evening. There is none of the cathartic enjoyment, if that is the right word, that Jason and Medea have, which I think is rather hard to quantify, but they do get somewhere and they finish. Whereas the chorus are left absolutely stripped of their skin and hung up on a washing line and blowing in the wind and have no way of coming down at all.

 
ruth scodel: My question is probably more for Fiona, but maybe not just her. I've seen a fair number of Medeas and I've read a lot of scholarship about funny passages in Greek tragedy, but I don't think it had ever occurred to any of us that Medea could be funny. And the first half of this production was very funny indeed. My fourteen-year-old daughter laughed until she started crying. The evening started me thinking about how many Greek tragedies in fact you could do that with. Oedipus Rex could probably be a howler [laughter] right up to Jocasta's big exit. So what I'm asking is how you came to think of doing it that way and extracting all this humor from lines that are normally proclaimed instead of tossed out. It was wonderful, but it was a total surprise.

 
fiona shaw: I think it was probably a surprise to us too. There are two reasons for it: one is that I've worked with Deborah a lot and so my only function in the rehearsal room is to entertain her. One of the reasons I love working with Deborah is that she is so clear and I'm so muddled; most of my ideas are really bad. The really nice thing about my ideas is that Deborah gets hysterical laughing at them. We'd come across a lot of stories about what happens to people in this illogical state of sexual jealousy of which there are many tragic and also terribly comic examples in the newspapers every day. There was a friend of my parents and he cut the bed in half—they had a beautiful antique bed, and, you know, it's a symbol, isn't it? And there is a man in America I'd read about, that when the judge said he must give half of all his possessions to his ex-wife, he got up on the house and with a chain saw halved the house. And it's completely understandable when the logic of the thing goes out the window. People have cut their husband's suits in half. There is wonderful case in England of a woman who took her husband's wine collection and delivered two bottles of vintage wine to everyone in the neighborhood. Revenge is a very odd dish, and best served cold, as they say.

So there's a lot of comic aspects. We were also into burning sheets. I began to wear various face masks. There was a Darth Vader mask I wore for a while and Deborah enjoyed that very much. The domestic life is full of comedy. There is something so functionally misfitting about husbands and wives probably anywhere, that the triumph of humanity is that people stay together at all. The play is a very a-domestic play. There are not many jokes in Elektra, mind you. There are no jokes in Elektra. Medea is about marriage and something about marriage is intrinsically funny because there is something comic about the conceptual framework which Euripides seems to have got. The arguments which are very intellectual and very clear between the two sexes have a sort of fundamental disjuncture between their understanding of life. Jason has a point and it is not fundamentally wrong that a man marries and doesn't really want to settle. One can completely understand it. One can also understand that a woman once she settles doesn't want her husband to marry somebody else. These are very important situations, but they are full of humor. In a tragedy, you have to understand the characters as well-rounded realistic people and real life is full of humor. I played Hedda Gabler directed by Deborah and I found that one of the most entertaining and humanizing things for me in that role was that someone could watch their own tragedy and be amused by it, whilst in it.

 
ruth scodel: The goal of Seneca's Medea is to turn into Euripides' Medea. That's what Seneca's people are like. But your Medea, I had a feeling she had a certain distance from being Medea and I guess that's what you're saying.

 
fiona shaw: A demi-goddess? Medea as a sort of demigod? Last night I watched on the Discovery or Biography channel the life of Diana, and it was very interesting that she couldn't have been Medea because Diana had done nothing before she married Prince Charles. The Medea you meet in the play is a woman who's done an enormous amount of things, some of them amoral. But it doesn't matter. They're things that have made her famous already and they are achievements unlike our Hollywood associations where the achievement is quite slight. Medea's achievement is very real and so she's in that way a very complicated person, and the play a complicated piece of writing. Someone says, "Why did I ever leave my father's house and trust a Greek?" I think it's interesting that something like that can be written about two lines after "I'll kill the children." It's not just that it's humorous at the beginning, it's that the ironies go on unfolding in a more perverse way the deeper into the play you read; we are terribly morally reductive in our generation in that we think serious things are serious and funny things are funny. The terrifying truth is that they live cheek by jowl together.

 
benjamin acosta-hughes: In the text of Euripides there are a number of lines that are contested; they may or may not belong to the play and when we read them in Greek class we have them in brackets. To what extent are you bound by the text in your performance? I mean, to what extent is it ever an impediment and you have to work beyond it or around it?

 
fiona shaw: Once you agree on a text you have to be pretty true to that text or else you probably would improvise the play and Medea is not a play there for improvising. I'm not an enormous admirer of all of the translation of this version. I'd love to go back to Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael and say "iron that bit out" but rewriting a translation just isn't quite livable, you know. The translation hasn't got too many composite nouns, which is a great relief. There's not too much "bloodlust" and "tablecloth" and things like that.

 
deborah warner: I'm very bound by the text once I've committed to one. I think there could be a dreadful production of Medea available on this text, no question. There could be some extremely wooden and troublesome stuff and I'm not sure that the very first time we went out with this that it was particularly fluent. We worked and worked away within this frame and we are extremely true to Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael. We finally wrestled it to the ground. It did take a lot of time and I think to a degree it took rather a lot of courage, you know, because, I'm slightly embarrassed to remember, some of this stuff was there for my entertainment early on in rehearsal. I thought oh, goodness, we can't do that, and partly because of the history of Fiona's complete shock and the horror when she found out that there were no jokes in Elektra at all, and to a degree mine because I'd worked on Titus Andronicus and indeed King Lear and did think that there was no tragedy at all available without humor. I really did think that.

 
yopie prins: Benjamin, what's the line you mentioned just before our panel began that ends with "a husband" that you thought was played perfectly?

 
fiona shaw: He was everything to me and now he is the vilest man alive—my husband [applause].

 
benjamin acosta-hughes: Out of curiosity, when you initially started thinking about doing Medea, did you look at a number of different translations?

 
deborah warner: I was interested in Kenneth McLeish's work because he had been responsible for the Elektra. So I did look at others, but I came to this one for its simplicity and boldness. I sat in an airport reading it because I had to make a decision very quickly about whether we were going to do this translation or not, just reading the three Jason and Medea scenes. They read much more like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Streetcar than like a classical text and that was very appealing to me. I wanted something with that more immediate and contemporary bite. Perhaps I should have done a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which I long to do, but Fiona's not old enough. But I shall wait for that.

 
fiona shaw: Next year . . . next week.

 
linda gregerson: We had a study group a couple of weeks ago and someone brought up a question that I'd love your help with. It was about stepping back a bit into the very broad and indeed popularized distant reception of this play. Even people who don't know the play at all know that it's about Medea's killing of her children. The person who spoke said there is one other myth in which this foreknowledge works. We think that we know Oedipus or that we know Medea without knowing the plays or the myths in any of their detail, but about Oedipus we have other ways of imagining the really brute contours of the story. There is a Freudian manner, but we don't need to go there if we understand it as a figure for the common fate of human kind, that at some level just by the sort of assaultive ironic affront of our surviving our parents, we kill them and that that's a harsh thing for human beings to contemplate or assimilate. But we don't have alternate ways of taking in that brute distillation of the Medea story. It's, in fact, unassimilable. It's not something that we can eat or digest. I wonder if maybe you think that's not the case; I'd love your thoughts or some assistance with that.

 
fiona shaw: It's to Deborah, but may I just say one thing? I think there are many ways of killing children and I think that children are killed all the time actually. And I have no academic relationship to the play at all except that when you spend all these weeks on it you begin to meditate on the fact of it. There's a term which is think is a psycho-therapeutic term so it may have only a temporary relevance, but it's "narcissistic parents." Jason and Medea, as are mine, are narcissistic parents. My parents spend their time in permanent battle with each other. I don't think I was killed, I think my elder brother was killed though he walks the planet. And I think that there are levels in this play like the rungs of a ladder that are remarkably pertinent, to the point that some of the audience's attention is not at the horror of the play, but at the recognizable stages of the play. You are absolutely right that we have a notion that Medea is a woman who kills her children, they're sort of irrelevant, a very excessive unusual end to a lurid newspaper story. There's piles of warning in it: be careful if you are leaving your spouse to protect them. The whole crass mythology of western society that children come first is just not true—human passion comes first and children are merely the offshoot of that passion and our endless belief and our endless playing out of—sorry I'm on a roll now—parents saying to children "all the things I've done for you." Adults do things for each other. Adults will kill to preserve passion no matter what and I think the play is a massive warning sign about that fact.

 
deborah warner: I think that's beautiful. That's exactly what it is. Approaching Medea as a witch and sorceress is a terrible impediment and there's absolutely no question that that was the hardest hurdle of all. It's very difficult to get over. I do believe we got over it. This journey is so complicated and so extraordinary, the one hour and thirty minutes of how she does finally come to this horrible place of killing their two children. It does come as a surprise and I do think that's marvelous because we all know exactly where the evening's going to end when we enter the theater. That's Euripides' genius. He has actually taken us on a journey that still allows the most famous incident in the play to be a surprise and a shock.

 
linda gregerson: May I ask one follow-up question? The opposition between sexual passion and at some level the accident or by-blow of biological reproduction is something Fiona's comment brought to vivid light. This play seems to meditate on the other aspect of having children; there is a choral speech about the whole question, "why do people seem to have children? It just makes them more liable to disaster." Is there anything we are supposed to be learning about, not simply the sometimes disastrous opposition between sexual passion and what it yields in familial terms, but also the two modes of having children: the one that has them in the mind and the one that has anything but them in mind?

 
deborah warner: In a ghastly way the children are secondary, as Fiona has said, to this overwhelming passionate affair between Jason and Medea. This is not the first woman who's been abandoned nor the last but she's possibly one of the few women who has killed her brother and then been abandoned. Thus the impossibility of what's occurring in the play—Jason really can't leave because Medea has murdered a member of her family for him and I think that is indeed a lesson: if you give everything that there is to give for passionate love, that's what happens when it goes wrong and there we are, children or no children.

 
fiona shaw: Supposedly we belong to that particular generation of absolutely admiring people who give up everything for love. Probably the notion was started by the Brontes, but we are still in that hangover of Romantic passion as being the highest form of love, and presumably, the children produced from such passion are all the more precious. And I think this play really pulls one up short on that illusion to say: do we want these explosions of passion that produce children who are then . . . ?

 
deborah warner: There isn't that much room in the play for developing the roles of those two children. The actors played them very nicely, but I don't think there are individual moments that you can really work upon to create individualized characters. They're not in the play to demand our attention.

 
katherine mendeloff: This was the most sensual production of Medea that I have ever seen. It was very erotically charged; the casting chemistry between Jason and Medea was palpable. And the amount of time they were physically connected was really, really effective . . . I'm looking at it directorially. That powerful sexual attraction was revolutionary in terms of helping me see them as these two monoliths: Jason. Medea. The other thing was the children were sensual creatures too because the language is, look at their soft faces, their soft eyes, and the way Fiona touched them. They're boys too. They're little Jasons and so some of the erotic or animal attachment to these little boys really came through and that was just wonderful.

And I wanted to just ask you, Fiona, about your development of the physicality of the character because on the one hand there was this very strong erotic energy from you. I had never seen that scene with Aegeus in sexual terms before, as a seduction, and you played it that way and it made perfect sense to me that that was how he was going to get children. I thought you were going to throw a spell and that was how he was going to get children. But it was actually a kind of swivel of your hips that sent the message to him "wait till we get to Athens." But also your physicality was very awkward at times and you looked as though you were uncomfortable in your body, a woman who had been sexually awakened by Jason and then abandoned and therefore why were you carrying this body around and what do you do with it? I wanted you also to tell me, in your imagination, when you dismembered your brother, did you do it in a different way than when you killed your children?

 
fiona shaw: It's a problem for all of us whether sins of an earlier life cling to us, whether we can or can't get them out of our systems. Certainly, people remember them. If you were a bank robber in your early twenties or if you took drugs, it's very hard if you become president of a country because people do want to name your earlier behavior as being someway a prelude to your present behavior and, of course, it may or may not be so. We have to forgive ourselves our sins in order to move on. (It is a reason to try and be good so that you don't have these things clinging to you.) There's something fundamentally anti-academic about doing plays. For instance, the way in which you find things is often through an opposite. If the play is about hate, which is an intellectual notion, uh, a passionate notion, you'll probably find it though love theatrically. The arguments Jason and Medea have are about parting; but if every sinew in your body is about getting back together, that's much nearer the human experience. So it's terribly hard to study these plays and it's very hard to rehearse them too because one is drawn always to the intellectual power of the argument but in fact the tension comes from the at-odds-ness between wanting one thing and thinking you want another. That's where a lot of us live. If you have a Jason who is so fantastically identifiable as a hero as Jonathan Cake [the lead actor] is, there's multiple griefs about leavetaking. There's a wonderful line in a play I just did recently with Deborah, "there is no greater grief than to find no happiness but happiness in what is past." It's unlikely that Medea will ever meet a man remotely like Jason again anyway. He's magnificent and I think that people are often in love with somebody's magnificence. I'm not sure she's in love with his soul or his intelligence or anything like that. He is just a fantastic example of humanity and he is the father of her children. You could cast Joe Pesci as Jason and it might be all very, very sensuous, but it would be a different kind of relationship

 
deborah warner: Last night when Jonathan came on I was sitting next to an elderly man who turned to his partner and said, "That's Jason." He's recognizable, that's for sure. You asked about the physical and how it develops. I think that's very much about actors and rehearsing. It comes absolutely through the center of what's happening within the rehearsal room. It's organic and one can't invent any of that. I mean, the enormous application in making theatre is the choice of cast. You know, that is the big directorial starting point and indeed a statement of sorts. It's like painters choosing the colors they lay out on their palettes. That's going to be what you work with and it can go a hundred ways, but it is all-defining.

I'm not sure we are going to get to a question about the witch and the sorceress, but a lot of what we're talking about knocks into that. We can't define anybody by the term "witch" without considering that if she had magical powers she wouldn't be in this trouble. She'd sort it out and I think if one looks back over the deeds she has become famous for, one of them is that she killed the serpent coiled around the fleece. Well, brave, but not necessarily magical. The other one: that she killed the old king by a fabulous trick where she told the daughters that if she cut him up and put him in a pot she could lift him out new and young. And so she demonstrated this by cutting up an old ewe and lifting out a lamb. But this is rabbit in a hat stuff, which has been done and could be done again today. So at the point at which this play begins, I don't think we can truly believe that this woman is possessed of magical powers because she'd do something to save herself and her problem is she can't do anything.

 
ruth scodel: There is one place where you obviously didn't do what Euripides did: the conclusion where Medea doesn't have the magical object on which she escapes. But you end the production with Medea remaining on his level, easily accessible to him. If she had the corpses on her chariot which is on the roof or on the crane or something, of course Jason can't get to them. But here you have to ask, if he really wants the bodies why doesn't he just go in and get them. Maybe it's another way of pointing out that the children are not really what the play's about. I got the feeling that they may linger there forever unless the Corinthians come and kill them.

 
deborah warner: I'm very suspicious about this chariot, because a lot of our understanding about this chariot is a helpful little stage direction that we often see in texts inserted toward the end of the play. Medea says in the text that her father's father holds her high above her enemies, she absolutely says she's untouchable, she's born on high, she's above. But she is so Other at the moment of the final entrance as we play it. Fiona walks in carrying the two dead children. She is utterly untouchable. There is nobody who would touch her and I believe that the reason he doesn't kill her is because there is nothing left to kill. I don't think it's worth his while. Whatever this chariot meant to the ancient Greeks, I'm not sure that it meant exactly what many of us think it does, that she was somehow absolved of all her crimes. The Greek world didn't have chariots either. They didn't exist and this notion that they were a little bit higher up and Jason couldn't get to them, nonsense. I mean, my Jason could get anywhere. He could get halfway up the Empire State Building if he wanted because he would climb. Even 2500 years ago, there would be a similar problem at the end: why doesn't Jason climb up that little house at the back of the stage and rip her apart? I think it's because he doesn't want to.

 
fiona shaw: Whatever people's religious beliefs I think that probably history will say that we are a post-theistic generation. I don't know whether that is correct or fair, but the play does seem to indicate the emptiness or the hollowness by which the gods affect us. It would be much easier if we were all sure whether there is one god or whether there are a lot of gods and whether they are benign or whether they don't exist at all, but there is a hint that they don't exist at all in the play. I was rather fliply saying to Deborah that the Greeks didn't have flying chariots, but we do and our flying chariots have just recently done terrible damage. So it might have been more soluble to say, put her in an airplane and let her fly away, but it wouldn't have been comvincing in this sort of post-Beckettian world that we live in theatrically. We didn't know how to solve it. For weeks and weeks I was climbing up walls and jumping off ropes and jumping into the audience and none of them really rang true to the aesthetic of the production.

 
deborah warner: Even if she were lifted away we would still be dealing with the condition that she was in. It's not full of celebration, the last notes of this play. There is a stumbling block in all of this which is, what is this thing sent up to the palace that ignites the king and princess and is this magic or not? Something goes up there and certainly it's a little bomb in a box and it does explode and sets fire to the princess, but what does occur up there? This is where the messenger's speech is very very interesting. The reason for the extraordinary length of the speech where he describes the events up there is that that speech makes the killing of the children inevitable for Medea. She has to kill the children because if she doesn't, there will be more savage hands following along after her. So at that moment she is doing it for a quite another reason to any of the reasons she may have spoken about, boasted about. And what has happened up in that palace is much bigger, much, much bigger than one princess with a burning frock and her father getting caught in the blaze of it. I mean the place is destroyed. Clearly the speech describes something so colossal that the world has come to an end. I don't believe there's any Corinth left at the end of this play and I don't believe that those women are going home. I don't think there's anywhere to go. I mean, it's Hiroshima. It's a nuclear bomb that's gone off in there, or alarmingly, there is an 11th of September connection somehow because that boy describes something so huge, something so much bigger possibly than her intention—and I think we could say that's true of September the 11th. I don't expect whoever did it expected that the two towers would both fall down. Nobody did. It was unbelievable. And I do believe that someone coming to tell Bin Laden what had happened, he knew at that moment that he would have to kill his children indeed. And the history of the world was finished. Something just out of all proportion has occurred in this play and that's the horrific aspect of it.

 
yopie prins: There are two impulses, then. On the one hand to bring the action down to domestic scale and diminish the heroic and world historical, creating toys out of the Argo and all of the elements that are beyond the story, but at the same time there's a pivot and then suddenly we are into something way beyond the domestic scale.

 
deborah warner: It can't stay merely domestic. The domestic is absolutely the door to the epic, but you can't enter the epic without going through the door.