'Medea' is of our time, yet distant and strange - and savage

CULTURE SHOCK:IT IS HARD to get your head around the fact that Medeawas first staged 1,000 years before literacy took off in Ireland. Or, to look at it from a different perspective, to absorb the notion that for us to see it now is like someone going to see Waiting for Godotin the year 4500.

And yet, as Selina Cartmell’s intriguing production in the Dublin fringe festival reminds us, the problem in presenting the play is not to make it immediately “relevant” to us today but to avoid making it too much so.

Medeanever seems too far from contemporary Irish theatre. As Brian Arkins points out in his excellent recent book, Irish Appropriation of Greek Tragedy, Irish taste for versions of the Greeks has tended more towards Sophocles than Euripides – at least partly because of the multiple versions of Antigone, whose political resonances made it irresistible in the era of the Northern Ireland conflict. (The most overused line that the conflict produced, Seamus Heaney's "hope and history rhyme", is from his version of another Sophocles play, Philoctetes.) But Medeais the obvious exception.

Brendan Kennelly did a rich "version and translation" in 1988, using the original text but expanding it by about a third. Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats, first staged at the Abbey in 1998, is a looser version of Euripides, but one that retains the broad structure – and the female rage – of the original. Deborah Warner's brilliant Abbey production of 2000, with a superbly insidious performance by Fiona Shaw, did not use an Irish version (the text was by Kenneth McLeish), but Shaw's embodiment of Medea as a Montenotte matron made the connection to contemporary Irish life even more forcefully.

And yet in this very connectedness lies the danger. Tony Harrison wrote that "Beneath allGreek mythology / are struggles between HE and SHE / that we're still waging. / In every quiet suburban wife / dissatisfied with married life / is MEDEA, raging!" But seeing the suburban wife as a version of Medea is one thing. Making Medea into a suburban wife is quite another. We need, in other words, to feel the contemporary connection, but we should also feel the distance and the strangeness.

This is especially the case with the ferocious violence of the play. Medea’s revenge on her husband for abandoning her for the princess of Corinth is hair-raising even by the standards of Greek tragedy, which is saying something. Two adults, the princess and her father, Creon, die grotesquely at Medea’s hands. Two innocent children – her own sweet babes – are butchered by their mother.

It is generally assumed that the original Athenian audiences already knew the stories of plays like Medea, which were taken from the body of common myth, and could therefore concentrate on the form. But this is not entirely true. The myths came in many versions, and the playwrights could alter or add to the narrative. In the case of Medeait is most probable that the key point of the play – the murder of the children by their mother – was invented by Euripides.

If anything, it would have been even more shocking for its original audience than it is for us. Most people going to see the play today know what’s coming. The Athenians must have been stunned by this horrific twist on the old tale. A contemporary production has to reproduce this sense of utter horror for an audience that knows what’s going to happen and is inured to representations of extreme violence. At the same time, however, Medea must not be reduced to our own level. She is not a suburban housewife but a barbarian princess. She is not ordinary: she is a descendant of the sun itself, with powers and skills that border on the supernatural. And a Greek tragedy is not Ibsen. It is a sacred ritual whose solemnity is heightened by language, masks, movement and music.

What’s fascinating about Cartmell’s strongly cast production is that it threatens to go down the road of excessive familiarity and “relevance” before gradually shifting gear and rising towards the necessary magnificence. For the first third or so Cartmell – and Eileen Walsh’s Medea – seem drawn to the suburban-housewife version of the story. Paul O’Mahony’s remarkable set mirrors a contemporary house, with two bedrooms, a sitting room and a kitchen. It is cluttered with domestic detail: bunk beds, a flat-screen TV, a trendy lamp.

These omens are not good. The misplaced naturalism makes Walsh’s epic rage seem like mere hysteria. Bryan Murray has the tough task of making Creon a sacred ruler even though he is tricked out in boating gear like a Russian oligarch on the way to his yacht. The movement is fussy and, when it is stylised, unconvincing. Conor Linehan’s music is used to supply an otherwise absent sense of poetry to proceedings.

And yet the production does gradually get to grips with the grandeur of the play. Stuart Graham’s terrific Jason hits a perfect note halfway between myth and reality, and it seems to act like a tuning fork for the rest. Olwen Fouéré’s one-woman chorus discovers the restrained and precise poetry in Robin Robertson’s quietly muscular translation. Cartmell’s own invention kicks in, with a splendidly vivid piece of business involving a wedding cake. The music melds much more thoroughly with the words. And Walsh’s petulance rises towards epic fury, becoming, in the process, infinitely more powerful.

The effect is almost as if Euripides is imposing himself across the gulf of the millennia. His play may be infinitely capacious and open to interpretation in every time and place. But it will not be trifled with. It demands a ferocity and generates a devastation that resist the pull of intimacy. It will not be embraced with easy familiarity. Ultimately, Cartmell is smart enough to yield to those demands and is rewarded with a glimpse of what Greek tragedy is all about: the face of the implacable.