A colleague working in radio reports an interesting response to a vox pop conducted outside the National Theatre following a recent performance of the Greek tragedy, Medea. The reception for Deborah Warner's adaptation, starring Fiona Shaw, was generally enthusiastic, but many women did not think it appropriate that the killing of Medea's two sons be so graphically shown.
I find this telling. Medea's murder of her children is one of the most scarifying moments in theatre. To omit or sanitise it would be to remove the moral core of Euripides's play.
For those unfamiliar with the work, a brief synopsis: Medea, wedded to Jason with whom she came to Greece, now abandoned by her husband for a more attractive royal, kills her rival, her rival's father and her own two sons as an act of revenge.
Some reviewers referred to the "feminist polemic" of the play. By this logic, Medea's act is the consequence of her husband's selfishness, and therefore, we comprehend, excusable.
It is certainly true that women seem to feel the play has the same capacity to accuse men, here and now, that it might have had in Ancient Greece. You could see women in the audience at key moments glancing meaningfully at their male partners, as if to say, "Now, see what we have to put up with. Count yourself lucky I don't stab your children in their sleep." The woman sitting next to me flung her hands in the air every time Jason opened his mouth.
There is something odd here. Women generally got a raw deal in Ancient Greece, being little more than chattels of their husbands. But even within this context, Medea's actions should take us to the edge of human tolerance and sympathy; without it, her actions are not accessible to human understanding.
The central "sin" committed by Jason is that he divorces Medea to marry someone else. In Ancient Greece this may have denoted a certain brutishness, but in modern Ireland, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Ninety per cent of divorces, regardless of fault, result in the wife getting the family home, custody of the children and an income for life at the husband's expense.
In Ancient Greece, the average woman lived until her mid-30s, the average man 10 years more. In Ireland today, the average woman lives almost to the age of 80, some seven years more than her male counterpart. Ninety per cent of our suicide victims, 80 per cent of our drug addicts, and 90 per cent of people sleeping rough in our streets are men. Ancient Greece this ain't. And yet this play functions with more or less the same mainspring as it did 2,400 years ago: the notion that women are oppressed by men, without any means of responding.
The trick is effected by presenting a play other than the one Euripides wrote. Not only are there nuanced differences in the script, but there is a set of choices made in the casting and playing, particularly of the male roles, that drives the play in a different way to the original.
Kreon, the king and father of the bride-to-be, is played as a bully, who pushes Medea around before admitting he is afraid of her. Jason, the errant husband, is a muscle-bound himbo whose self-justifications play as pure parody. Fiona Shaw charms the harm out of Medea, winning our sympathy by tickling our funny bones, and concealing the fact that the production functions like a Christmas panto: the men being pompous tyrants and the women free spirits seeking to deflate this pomposity.
Medea is self-absorbed, selfish, a woman without redeeming qualities. She believes she can kill her children because she gave them life. In one scene, the audience is invited to collaborate: she announces how she proposes to trick her husband into assisting her to kill her rival and the children; then Jason swaggers on and enacts his omadaun stereotype, and the audience laughs as he walks into her trap. Look behind you: your dead babies.
But then comes the moment of the calamity, so inevitable and signposted it invites anti-climax. In this production it is relentless in its ferocity and utterly terrifying, an effect achieved mainly with pyrotechnics. The low hum which accompanies proceedings from the beginning rises to a crescendo and the shrieks of the children are underscored in a momentary thunderstorm of white noise and light. It stops for a delayed instant and we hear - of all things - a country 'n' western dirge rising from below; then it shatters the relief with a renewed ferocity.
These moments restore the moral equilibrium of the play, coming as near as conceivable to re-creating the intention of the original in the circumstances of today. In a sense, this production is more subversive than might have been a more rigorous adherence to the original, because, having allowed its audience to indulge its contemporary schadenfreude, it delivers a sharp kick in the crotch. There are no laughs, no meaningful glances at the end.
To do less would have been reprehensible. This play touches down here, now, in a feminist-dominated culture, in which virtually all public discourse, including artistic discourse, is vetted for political correctness. But Medea provides a chilling parable of the truth about personal power in a State which daily dispossesses fathers and children of the society of one another; which facilitates the abuse of children by mothers (in allowing them to be used as tools of blackmail); and routinely banishes men from their homes on the uncorroborated word of one person.
I can understand why some women would have preferred to see this play without having to dwell upon its central horror. Were I not so terrified of being denounced as a misogynist, I might suggest they wished to exercise their sense of grievance without being confronted by consequences.