Deadly Theater Meets Dead Horse
By Gordon Rogoff
Medea, By Euripides
Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov
Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2002-03
Fiona Shaw in full battle cry is a force of army engineering more than
nature--or even acting for that matter. Not that she isn’t carrying
an arsenal of acting tricks at every turn: a master of both rant and
silence, she sweeps past the narrative hurdles in Richard II,
Eliot’s Waste Land, and, more recently, Euripides’s
Medea as if texts exist mainly to be crushed into submission
by an unbridled will to own the acting universe. Along the way, she
calls upon voice, voice, and more voice, now caressing some soft consonants,
now heaving extended phrases into unguarded air sustaining them in a
pitched, fluting tremble that wishes to be music when it is only monolith.
Every note, every gesture emerges from calculation more than thought,
and heaven help the other actors caught in her fireworks power. Her
Jason in Medea (Jonathan Cake) attempts to outshout her at
the obvious junctures, and he’s capable of matching her serpentine
sinew with buffed muscle that ought to humble her, but apart from the
way the text is meant to settle things, he hasn’t a fighting chance
anyway, so driven is she by forces in her head that defy argument at
every turn. Even if I didn’t know that her boys are doomed, I
can see the end in every beginning because she can’t stop herself
from starting at the end.
“Who can stop grief’s avalanche once it starts to roll?”
asks a woman in the Chorus, burdened with a Scottish accent in Deborah
Warner’s up-dated high-tech production, itself featuring plexiglass
and a center stage wading pool that share in the general placelessness
so celebrated these days when visual chic assumes greater importance
than textual illumination. There’s no doubt about the avalanche
starting to roll, but where’s the grief? Even in momentary pause,
following an opening sequence in which both Nurse and Chorus flail from
one side to another like bumper cars babbling in run-on sentences, Shaw’s
Medea can only sidle slowly from the wings, wearing shades; within seconds,
it’s clear that this arranged silence carries only the meaning
of its contrast with the frenzy that precedes it. More a program note
than a conveyed idea, it is signaling the news that Medea must have
been in tears recently, but given all the obvious contemporary associations,
it can also be seen as a fashion statement or the gesture of a movie
star (try Alexandra del Lago in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet
Bird of Youth) noisily trying not to call attention to herself
by calling attention to herself. Then she speaks in four short bursts,
ever so conversationally: “My lovely life is lost. (Pause) I want
to die. (Pause) He’s the vilest man alive (pause) my husband.”
At which point she laughs, thus eliciting the same from her audience;
finally, “I am a souvenir from foreign parts,” this time
punctuated not by a pause, but a kick back of one foot from the knee--still
another solicitation of laughter from an audience now gaga in anticipation.
All these controlling devices can be construed as Medea’s, of
course, but as they take over the instrument and the narrative, they
keep setting up barriers against the original, primeval events peculiar
to Attic tragedy in favor of actorial display: a show of feeling, not
the thing itself.
Then, too, she exhibits an alarmingly literal mind, prone to illustration,
as if we won’t get the joke or the grief without her decorating
assistance--churning an imaginary brew when speaking of a witch, dipping
into a cake slice when contemplating which road to death she might take,
suddenly interjecting, “This is delicious.” By the middle
of this solo performance, it’s clear that when she dashes over
to a pile of boxes or other objects, then hops onto a higher level,
asking what Apollo says, then jumping down just as suddenly as she jumped
up, she has complete run of the stage, the others, even Jason much of
the time, more satellites than characters, either locked in space or
given to following her orbits. When, finally, she tells the Chorus that
she will kill her children, despite the oath just sworn to Aegeus, she
adds, “I’m a woman. I have to cry.” But if that’s
the case, whatever happened to the shades?
Shaw and Warner are too smart, I keep thinking, to spread so much
incoherence over a text already compromised by its origins in a world
we can never claim to know as we know our own. If Euripides can be adopted
as our contemporary, as Jan Kott adopted Shakespeare, then we have rights
of our own to consider: for one, the right to talk back, as we might
wish the Chorus would do, faced with the unholy destruction so clearly
announced when it still might be headed off at the pass; for another,
the right to protest that, in hijacking this play into street clothes,
it has become a bizarre display of psychological warfare gone public,
which finally has lost all contact with Euripides’s immense canvas
crisscrossing contrasts between barbarism and civil order. As William
Arrowsmith puts it in his essay, "A Greek Theater of Ideas,"
Medea and Jason “are both destroyers, destroyers of themselves,
of others…And it is this destructiveness above all else
which Euripides wants his audience to observe: the spirit of brutal
self-interest and passionate revenge which threatens both life and culture,
and which is purposely set in sharp contrast to life-enhancing Athens
where the arts flourish…” Sharp contrasts, however, are
not part of the Warner-Shaw scheme, so into the wading pool and out
with the bloodied bath water go all those layers so unavailable to splashy
directorial strokes--above all the idea dramatized by Medea’s
escape (in the text, but not in this production) to Athens on the Sun’s
golden chariot, an idea that “forces the private agon
of Jason and Medea,” says Arrowsmith, “ to assume a larger
public significance, namely that both have lost all possible wisdom,
a loss clearly pointing to “a tragic defeat for man and human
culture.”
It’s odd, too, that the Shaw-Warner team, striving so strenuously
to highlight the play’s modernity, are content with the obvious
inconsistencies that come with revisionist territory, some of them simply
a matter of theatrical strategy: are we in the streets, a playground,
a bathhouse, and if so, why does this raving maniac have the run of
the place without a cop in sight to check her noise, if not her raucous
threats? It may be one thing for a Scottish Chorus woman to be dancing
an Irish jig, but surely it’s another for her and the others to
remain so splattered with paralysis that not one of them acts to call
the cops or save the kids. Why, when Medea asks “Why did I ever
leave my father’s house and trust a Greek?” does it suddenly
loom as a trivial intrusion, not unlike a later observation, “Do
golden lives mean happiness?” What is served by all the blasting
sound-design screeches when Medea is doing the deed, or all the decorative
blood spattered on the plexiglass doors and window? And then, what are
we to make of the sound suddenly cut down to an off-stage radio emitting
low-key jazz, almost as if we’ve been witness instead to the poker
game in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire? Where in
the name of sense and sensibility are we? And the answer has to be a
theatrical playpen void of anchor, placement, ideas, more installation
than drama, a shameless celebration of acting talent run amok and quite
content to surround itself--by the way--with actors who make the showcase
easy by exhibiting so little talent themselves.
And here I pause for a contextual confession. In the best of times,
I am myself a Hamlet-manque, more adept at delay than action,
though I still insist that Hamlet, bless him, delays not merely to push
the drama to its necessary limits, but also to engage himself in an
inescapably alluring moral quagmire. That said, I’m not so wedded
to self-deception that I make claims on Hamlet’s lofty territory.
Instead, I admit now that, in hesitating for months to write this response
to Shaw and Warner’s popular success, I’ve been thinking
that “not to be” might be the best revenge against the tawdry
mess that so much theatre-making has become: incoherence as a badge
of honor (effects vs. ideas), decoration as a substitute for meaning
(the same), and mediocrity as a democratic right (also the same). In
short, I’ve been inclined to give up. Or rather (and not so short)
to give up when bombarded with so many shamefully lazy productions that
reveal their desperation at arousing an audience with anything less
than a jump-cutting noise meant to compete successfully with the high-tech,
take-no-prisoners stupidity of marketplace media in which every breath,
every grunt, every gesture looks like a commercial.
To be fair, not least to myself, I should add that, having seen Medea
at BAM, I bought myself a ticket later to see how Warner might adapt
her work to a Broadway proscenium, and perhaps, to a perceptibly different
audience. Not much, as it happens: the Nurse was moderately less breathless
in her opening passage, but not more articulate or pointed than before;
the others still behaved like extras wandering on to the Warner lot;
and one textual “correction” revealed a self-consciousness
that might be interpreted as damage control. Where Jason at BAM had
said: “All this…for sex?” he was saying now, “All
this…for jealousy?”--not bad as a sign that even Warner
could recognize a laugh line that, once said and done, was exasperatingly
inappropriate. It’s safe to say, however, that nothing substantial
was subjected to fresh thought: Medea remained in place as a Tony candidate,
a new play that might be re-titled The Comedy of Terrors.
Still another pause: I have referred to “popular success,”
and there can be no doubt now that this Medea, holding a distorting
mirror up to the nature of Euripides’s tragedy, has found an audience
at BAM and on Broadway that swings into standing ovations at the drop
of a houselight, bull-dozed by Shaw’s indisputable high-wire technique,
self-proclaiming and thoughtless though it may be, possibly because
they’ve invested so much cash and time in the hope of live-action
excitement, or that half of them are being bullied by the other half
into a thoughtless submission equal to the production’s, or--more
neutrally--that they can see the actors over the standing bodies only
by standing themselves. Whatever the explanation--and it’s a newish
phenomenon at concerts and operas also--it must stand also as a reminder
to some of us that the critical act need not surrender its own analytical
and spontaneous response in deference to an intimidating mob.
I might have held my peace on this front, and even withheld my review
of Medea had it not been for two standing ovations more recently
at BAM given to Sam Mendes’s parade of High School inanities under
cover of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night, also from
Britain. Again, unequal casting left both plays in a limbo where relationships
were never explored, solo “moments” flying thick and fast
while the director supplied the most minimal attention to narrative
detail, preferring instead to rely on his battery of special effects:
a framing device for each play (a trestle table for Vanya with
a spread of decorous grass in the back, and a giant picture frame itself
for Twelfth Night with a hundred candles where the grass had
been for the Chekhov play, and a canopy of lamps floating over the cinemascopic
central action) and as a consequence, creating for both plays extended
exits and entrances that bring what little has been happening to an
excruciating halt, as if the tempi for each play can be the same, or
that adagio ponderoso is a steadily bearable tempo anyway.
Some solos, particularly those by Simon Russell Beale as Vanya and
Malvolio, are better than bearable: a true actor with a gift for economical
choice and physical detail--his Vanya rolling like an aimless beach
ball from one side of the stage to the other, his Malvolio leaning into
an officiously dainty ballet walk, left arm hanging idly by his side--he’s
also in full command of that splayed, noisy outburst from a Vanya clearly
more disgusted with himself than with anyone else, and of the menacing
quiet he finds for the “notoriously abused” Malvolio at
the end. On the evidence, however, he’s going it alone, neither
hindered nor helped by a director content to be statically visual without
ever arranging space for actors to stalk one another in urgent conversation.
And to top it all, Mendes can’t resist one painfully unfunny and
vulgar arrangement: the laborious appearance of a large sofa on a stage
otherwise populated by an army of Thonet chairs for both plays, placed
there for the truly specious effect of concealing two little fart machines
under the cushions so that Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew can sink into
them on behalf of several flatulent emissions. True to his name, Sir
Toby does belch a few times in earlier scenes, but just in case we’re
too dense to get the point of Toby’s libertarian nature, Mendes
dumps a signal to us that he really should have been named Sir Toby
Fart. Let’s hope the future Sir Sam learns to mend his adolescent
ways.
Meanwhile, back to the more pressing alarms roused by the acclaimed
Medea, disdaining tragic scope, celebrating hip imagery while
ignoring the anguish hanging over our new century ever since it was
captured in a spectacularly stealthy coup d’etat by a new gang
of barbarians hell-bent on dominating the world stage. But even if this
rampaging performance might be seen to be soliciting a modern political
stance to match its modernist theatrical coups, it’s a barely
visible politics by the end, one that limits itself--at best--to repeated
harangues from that old suspect, the melodramatically wronged woman.
True, Shaw’s Medea is more articulate than Joan Crawford’s
Mildred Pierce, but then she’s working with the ghost of a classier
poet than Crawford ever knew. It became all too clear, even without
the missing chariot, however, that the Warner-Shaw team was effectively
performing a major lobotomy of Euripides when it might have been more
to the point had the text been used as a springboard instead for their
own new play--a meditation, perhaps, on the consequences of revenge
as a way of life and death, or on love as a cruel, even homicidal, myth;
or, yet again, about a public wrenched into blind neutrality and dangerous
confusion when confronted by a seizure of power prepared to obliterate
civil compacts and public interests. Anything except this exhausted
remnant from the annals of victim psychology.
And then, like a deus ex machina intervening in my own exhausted psychology,
my partner and I slipped into our seats at the PanPan Festival of International
Theatre in Dublin last January only to discover MedEia, produced
by Amsterdam’s Dood Paard, and written by Oscar van Woensel--though,
as it turns out, written in a collaborative manner with two other actors
in the company, Manja Topper and Kuno Bakker. Here, at last, is a remarkably
plain-spoken new play that gives genuine voice, most of all, to the
Chorus, here played by the three collaborators, moving gently and firmly
from one gender to another while slipping unannounced into fresh thoughts
from Medea and Jason themselves. The text alone (published in the next
issue of Theater magazine) deliberately bypasses stage directions
or descriptions of what the company actually presents, beginning with
the voice of Maria Callas emerging from the darkness in a lamentation
from Cherubini’s opera Medea, and continuing into four
scenes and three interludes, the latter featuring TV monitor slide-shows
with (mostly) pop accompaniment that, in most circumstances, leave me
in one form of dudgeon or the other, high or low.
In this instance, however, with Callas haunting the memory bank, and
the quiet shock of the devastating opening line that follows her--“I
am so sad”--to say nothing of the unmannered, yet quietly insistent,
presence of the three actors, moving from their initial upstage distance
into a scene-by-scene forward placement backed by the white sails they
haul down from the ceiling to mark one section of the text from another,
the entire experience presents an unembarrassed blend of sacred and
profane thought. And this mysterious mix bridges worlds otherwise torn
apart by too many interpretive differences, leaving Chorus and actors
alike in numbed awareness of their essential helplessness. Yet, even
so, they are still standing in the final moments, merciless about themselves,
Medea, Jason--us--but not entirely without salvation, because they have
demonstrated one weapon all along: the eloquence they can summon when
talking to power. By the end, then, they are almost as close to us as
we are to each other, tellers of a tale spoken in what they call “broken
English,” a claim weirdly untrue, though a sign of their essential
modesty, surely, since what they write and speak is as undecorated and
direct as an ancient Greek statue.
And, in sharp contrast with the hortatory private wars fought by Shaw
and Warner, this MedEia is also close to the news of the day,
not by trying so strenuously, but by simply giving voice, almost like
testament prophets, to all the damage running out of control. Take,
for just one example, their pre-Rumsfeld scolding-- “You are in
the rich world now…What would you have been without me…Nothing.”
It’s as if, by air-lifting both fact and paranoia into their story,
they are dramatizing what little space has been left for sanity to breathe.
A play that reduces itself in conventional terms to a screed about hurt
and rage has been rescued suddenly for more peaceful purposes, telling
me, at least, what I need to hear whenever I’m drawn to public
space--namely, that others are noticing the violations causing so much
suffering, that sharers out there are willing not to be so secret after
all. It’s truly wondrous to walk behind the following exchange:
Maybe it is better not to be one of the major
Dramatis personae
Our lives in the chorus
My life as the chorus
it is troubled enough
To witness this business
it’s more than I can bear
And what I find back there is witness to complexity, recognition,
barely speakable anguish--elegantly laid across a performing space with
an honesty and grace that elude most public exchange, not least in our
theaters. The actors, incidentally, do not flaunt themselves, nor do
they make claims on technical prowess; neither do they exhibit the slightest
sign of self-pity or pride: instead, they simply present the result
of what looks like old-fashioned hand-crafted labor. Woensel, especially,
is the anti-Shaw, a long-limbed, resonating free-spirit without guile,
never pretending anything even as he succeeds in touching on everything.
He’s the real woman inside every man, and the truly manly man
unafraid of woman.
One final observation. Dood Paard means Dead Horse, surely the one
Woensel and friends are incapable of beating as they go gently into
each good night of creation.
[Gordon Rogoff is Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Literature
at the Yale School or Drama, author of Vanishing Acts (Yale
U P, 2000), and recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by
the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991.]