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An age-old tale of adultery

By John Angell Grant Special to the Daily Planet
Saturday November 16, 2002

Murder and big-time bloody mayhem are what Medea commits when her husband starts fooling around with another woman. Cal Performances opened an ingenious and powerful modern-dress rethinking of the Greek classic Thursday at Zellerbach Playhouse on the UC Berkeley campus. 

The play is a high-end touring production by Ireland’s famed Abbey Theater. Acclaimed in both London and New York, the show first premiered two years ago. 

This “Medea” is about a woman in love with an ambitious and opportunistic husband, who decides to improve his lot by leaving her to marry the daughter of a king. It is also about the misery of womanhood in a world where women have no identity if they are not wives. 

The Abbey is using a rich and accessible modern psychological translation of the play by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael. Raphael wrote screenplays for the films “Eyes Wide Shut,” Two for the Road” and “Darling.” 

Medea is angry that her husband Jason is divorcing her to marry the king’s daughter. Jason says it’s a good deal, that she shouldn’t take it so seriously. They will still be partners, he claims, and she’ll reap financial and power benefits. 

In the nightmarish 80 nighttime real minutes that the show runs, Medea decides she is fed up. She then throws a spanner in the works by arranging four ghoulish murders. 

Designer Tom Pye’s very effective set suggests the pool patio of an upscale dot-commer’s monster villa evolving in progress. Cinderblocks scattered by the pool and sheet rock piled on flats seem to await construction workers. 

In director Deborah Warner’s intelligent and nerve-wracking production, light from the pool shimmers on the villa’s back wall. A glass-wall around the pool patio emphasizes a stripped-down psychological world.  

As Medea, Fiona Shaw prowls the patio, a beautiful, lanky, powerful, elegant, sophisticated woman in a once-elegant dress, consumed by rage and transformed into a wild beast. At other times she becomes more calm and reasonable.  

When discussing things with the chorus women of her town, Medea’s anger moves back and forth, in and out of a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. She turns in a fascinating performance of a modern woman in modern clothing, distilling the issues of the 2500-year-old text. 

Medea’s relationship with husband Jason (Jonathan Cake in stylish dot-commer jeans and white T-shirt) is volatile. They argue viciously, but still obviously have a hot, passionate, sexual relationship. 

Moments of touching and intimacy punctuate the anger. He tries to sell her on the new marriage as a huge business opportunity and get her to go along with it. 

There is excellent work from other members of the cast. Struan Rodger makes an early forceful appearance as the autocratic king in an expensive, chic suit, raging at Medea on the limitations of women. 

Once the bloodletting begins, Derek Hutchinson is a devastated messenger bringing a ghoulish report of two sadistic off-stage deaths by poisoning. Joseph Mydell is powerful nearby king Aegus, pledging rescue of Medea. 

Some of the chorus members and an early tutor (Robin Laing) had thick Irish accents that were difficult to understand. 

In Warner’s direction of Shaw there is a rich undertone of occasional mimicking sitcom posturing that modernizes the story and adds moments of humor. This allows the story to breathe and makes the tragic violence of the outcome feel even more inevitable, hopeless and timeless. 

This is a powerful show about a frightening psychological world in which, as one character observes, “water flows up hill.” Medea is one tough woman. And if you mess up, she knows what to do.