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The Myth of Medea
By Nick Thomas
Starring: JENNIFER ROBINSON, JAMES REILLY
Run: Oxford: 30 March – 3 April 2004, Old Fire Station Studio Theatre
…'One twitch,/One
dreaming flicker of the serpent's tail/and all your cities tumble into Hell!'
First dramatised by Euripides in 431BC, Medea has
inspired writers and enthralled audiences ever since. The story of a wronged
woman, an exotic sorceress who wreaks a terrible revenge on her own family
and on her adoptive home, Medea remains as fresh and gripping a tale as
ever. Now Instinctive Theatre presents a dazzling new treatment by
Oxford playwright Nick Thomas, whose
past work at the Old Fire Station includes 'Sweet Ladies' and 'Dancing
Bears', which was awarded Critics' Choice in Time Out magazine.
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PRESS COMMENT
Oxford Times, Friday April 2nd
2004
Nick Thomas must be the most prolific playwright working in Oxford. Those who
admired his entertaining musical Jericho Place with composer Nick Kenworthy-Browne, or his recent comedy Sweet
Ladies, were however in for a shock on Tuesday night with his remarkably
tough and honest take on The Myth of Medea at the OFS.
This Medea is "indebted to" Euripides
in much the same sense as Cherubini's great opera---
Thomas is not translating but using
the Greek play's characters and situation as a starting-point. His first
great success, I feel, is his remarkable use of blank verse. Even in Shakespeare the pentameter can become tedious, but Thomas writes a lightly accented line and avoids
the awful 'poetic' outbursts of those dreadful plays by Christopher Fry
and T.S.Eliot to which I remember being dragged in my youth. On the other
hand, when he wants a 'big' effect, he is all economy and power--- Medea,
having described her doomed children as 'those pale invaders borne by me'
compares their whiteness to Greek statues and adds: 'That's why the Greeks
bury their dead. Statues don't burn.'
This Medea, angry and hurt, yet relentlessly rational, would be a
challenge for any actress, and it was a delight to see the part taken not by
some ferocious Maria callas
lookalike, but by a relative newcomer, Jennifer Robinson.
Young, beautiful and with a lovely speaking voice, she epitomised the paradox
that the 'mad' Medea is truly the only sane person on the stage. James Reilly's
Jason (bravo! Thomas---
much more credible than in Euripedes) was a powerful study in has-been
heroism and helpless love; Naeem
Chudry and Lander Dunbar were
strong as Creon and Aegeus respectively, the latter's American accent ideal
for the king of powerful, nearby Athens.
Thomas is a child of his time, and The Myth of Medea inevitably
touches on issues such as feminism and asylum-seekers. But that is not the point---
he has written a first-rate modern tragedy.
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