Black Medea by Wesley Enoch, directed by the writer. With Margaret Harvey,
Aaron Pedersen, Michael Morgan/Jesse Rotumah-Gardiner and Justine Saunders.
Beckett Theatre @ The Malthouse, until June 5.
A while back, around Nietzsche, the gods deserted classical tragedy. They
were scaled back to psychological symbols: the Furies became
externalisations of Orestes' guilt, and Oedipus' fate - to kill his father
and marry his mother - became expressions of subconscious desire.
These interpretations are a reasonable response by post-Enlightenment
culture to the questions posed by these capricious arbiters of human fate.
To the rationalist West, pagan gods could seem perilously silly. But it can
be argued that tragedy lost as much as it gained by the psychological
domestication of the gods: the sacred and the divine are as much part of the
tragic experience as catastrophe.
One of the fascinating aspects of Wesley Enoch's adaptation of Medea is that
the gods are back, as potent, implacable and bloody as ever. Enoch has
freely transposed the legend of Medea to indigenous themes, and his
muscularly poetic text excavates an often obscured aspect of its chthonic
energy. Here Cypris (Aphrodite), the main mover of events in Euripides'
play, is replaced by the vengeful ancestral spirits of Central Australia.
Since the ancestral spirits are also the land, they have a literal potency
that can resonate with even the most secular white.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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