The Arts:The latest site-specific show from Corcadorca reimagines the ancient Greek story of Medea and Jason and, in the process, dissects many myths of the modern world
'GOOD PUZZLE would be cross Dublin without passing a pub," Leopold Bloom thinks to himself as he strolls along Dorset Street. Looking over Cork from the 17th floor of the County Hall, one thinks that another good puzzle would be crossing the city without passing the site of some Corcadorca production or other. Directly below is Fitzgerald's Park, so playfully explored in summer twilight for 2001's A Midsummer Night's Dreamand whose pond was the stage for The Tempestin 2006; across from that is the old Irish Distillery which was the starting point for The Merchant of Venicein 2005, a show that took its audience along with it to Washington Street and into the court house there.
Farther off rises Patrick's Hill, upon which the Trial of Jesus was performed by a 100-strong cast for an audience of thousands at Easter 2000. Facing Patrick's Hill across the city is the Elizabeth Fort, which Poland's Teatr Biuro Podroz felt was the perfect site for What Bloodied Man is That?its contribution to Corcadorca's ReLocations series.
Out of sight from the Western Road are the docklands whose cavernous old warehouses were filled with all the fire and anger of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Apelast year; also seen only in the mind's eye is Haulbowline Island, where Georg Buchner's Woyzcekwas staged amid the pathetic fallacy of a wet June in 2007.
It’s probably fair to say that Cork’s leading theatre company is well suited to its place. Whether coincidental or not, director Pat Kiernan’s deep engagement with site-specific theatre could not have a better setting. Cork people, Corcadorca has shown, love theatre and flock to it when it’s good – just don’t ask them to go sit in an actual theatre. Better to appeal to their chauvinism and make their much-loved city the stage. Better again, reintroduce them to neglected corners along the way.
“When we go into the theatre,” Pat Kiernan admits, “it’s like we’re a different company. Maybe the chocolate-box image of theatre prevails here a little bit too; that it’s a bit stuffy. But with going to places you maybe haven’t been before the show feels like more of an event. It’s more exciting for the audience. And when we try to find a site to put a production on, we make it a place people are interested in.”
The top floor of Cork's second-tallest building (the Elysian recently deposed County Hall) certainly qualifies as a site that would pique the audience's interest. We stand surrounded by glass walls giving a 360-degree panorama of the city and the surrounding tree-lined hills. With us, rehearsing actors Tadhg Murphy, Louis Lovett and Gina Moxley are playing with dolls. These are expository tools for Kiernan's production of Oscar van Woensel's MedEia, a postmodern take of Euripides' tragedy.
Kiernan has brought audiences with him all over Cork and he doesn’t intend to leave them behind during his latest production, based on a script which assumes a reasonable knowledge of the Medea myth, Euripedes’ take on it (it was he, most likely, who first had the tragic heroine kill her own children) and the backgrounds of such figures as Medea’s husband Jason (he of the Argonauts). At the same time, Woensel’s version dispenses with dialogue and linear narrative and is a flow of lines spoken by the chorus, a mixture of commentary, gossip and storytelling.
“This is not the play,” says Kiernan. “It’s about the idea of the chorus looking at the play in a modern way. For me the job is to clarify the idea of the Medea myth.” Hence the dolls acting out the story as it unfolds on various islands; they will guide even a novice through this most terrible of Greek tragedies. “Each actor,” Kiernan explains, “has a map in front of him which he follows with dolls. The geography can be confusing, you know, which island they are at at any time, and the story zig-zags as they comment on it, so we are clarifying that. “While the story jumps ahead and returns, the dolls represent the actual sequence at all times so it’s a reference point for the audience.”
And yet – just three actors and some dolls does not sound very Corcadorca. Five times as many performers and life-size models on stilts would be more typical, but Kiernan has taken the small-is-beautiful approach for this year's summer show. "I think that after doing The Hairy Ape, I felt a little bit like I had to look for another big text that allowed for a number of considerations: something episodic, something the audience can walk around with. Then I thought, 'I don't have to do that, we don't have to do that and, you know, I'd like not to have to do that'.
“You can’t have intimacy, which is something I wanted this time, and of course it’s a very particular kind of performance, to be communicating with 400 people a night in an acoustically unfriendly place: a warehouse, or outdoors on a windy island.”
Rather than rewriting and re-imaging scenes, the three actors and the director this time have to apportion lines and devise scenes from a text which goes from the incantatory (“I am Medea/ I am on a ship/ I am on the sea/ I am with him”) to the understated blandness of international English and to lines peppered with dozens of pop-lyric quotations (“So many tears I wept today/ And all the tears that I will weep today/ I’ll weep again tomorrow”).
“It’s liberating and it’s exciting, and going through it the actors contribute more,” says Kiernan. “There aren’t characters as such, so it’s very different style of performance and presentation for Corcadorca. That is very refreshing. It’s important for us and our audience to have something different.”
For Kiernan, MedEia'sparticular appeal to our moment is how it makes Corinthian women of all of us – following the most terrible events with avid attention to detail, but little emotional empathy. With modern media's endless supply of bad news, never before have people had such exposure to emotionally unengaging horror stories, blandly termed "tragedy" as if that were a neutral noun. "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", the chorus concludes. But surely the dispiriting insight for a modern audience is just that: we can forget that in our own lives, we are always the major dramatis personae.
“The audience is the chorus as well,” says Kiernan. “Our appetite for stories like the Wayne O’Donoghue case is enormous. And it’s primarily crimes of passion that really interest us, but we have a lack of sensitivity at the same time, a feigned concern at best. I wouldn’t want to punish anyone for that but I think it’s interesting, and the play looks at the psychology of that while, at the same time, it’s about love: the big imponderable, how blind we all are when we follow our hearts.”
MedEia
runs from June 13 to July 4 (except Sundays) at the Vertigo Suite, County Hall, Cork, as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival (June 15-28; corkmidsummer.com)