Medea: Out of the Mouths of Babes, REVIEW Aug 3 2022 ***

THEATRE 

At Theatre Works, St. Kilda until August 20, 2022

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***

This review was first published in The Age Arts online on Thursday Aug 4 and in print on Friday Aug 5, 2022. Click this link Medea-Babes. to read the review in The Age online. Scroll down to find the review.

L-R Emily Joy, Paolo Bartolomei, Willow Sizer photo by Morgan Roberts  

 

 

 

When developing Medea: Out of the Mouths of Babes, director Steven Mitchell Wright filtered the ancient Greek tragedy about the abandoned wife and mother who murdered her children through a group of five youngsters – the “children’s council”.

 

The production features striking, vivid imagery and cleverly executed live and recorded video (Chris Bennett) that cunningly incorporates the children’s drawings and video of them playing. The style merges cabaret, soap opera, melodrama, television and cartoonish characters that echo the children’s imagery such as the relentlessly cheerful King Creon (Emily Joy) and Jason (Paolo Bartolomei) with his flamboyant, heroic posturing.

 

The first 45 minutes has plenty of laughs beginning with a parody of TV entertainment news shows, complete with posing tabloid journalists wearing rictus smiles while they sensationalise and trivialise Medea’s (Willow Sizer) painful story, and TV psychic Priestess Brioche (Joy) who channels Medea’s children.

 

Medea is Jason’s betrayed trophy wife and a dissembling witch, and Sizer makes her the seething centre of this show, imbuing Medea with a sinister quality and howling, vengeful passion. Sizer adds a superb vocal layer, singing the brooding Mein Hertz Brennt (My Heart is Burning) from German band, Rammstein, Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know and Medea’s final mournful lullaby to her children.

 

Despite the intention to retell the myth from the children’s perspective, this production focuses on Medea with the children’s experience remaining an adjunct to Medea’s volatile and horrific tale. They are most frequently silent witnesses, observing or eavesdropping from the wings, looking small and frail in pyjamas, their wide-eyed silence exposing their vulnerability. To make palpable the horror of the children’s world, the production could further explore the impact of family dysfunction, conflict, separation, domestic violence and madness.

 

Willow Sizer, photo by Morgan Roberts

Eventually, the tone and style shift from predominantly comic to dramatic. After the torturous, writhing death of Jason’s new wife Princess Tiffany (Bartolomei), killed by Medea’s poisonous gown, the last 20 minutes are more consistently dramatic and atmospheric with dark, roiling imagery, rumbling soundscape (Rachel Lewindon) and atmospheric lighting (Ben Hughes). These final scenes successfully capture a creeping sense of menace and the insidiousness of Medea’s actions.

 

Hahnie Goldfinch’s evocative design features Greek columns and distressed plaster walls with multiple video screens above and below the stage. The eclectic costumes are a combination of children’s dress-ups and more complex, abstract outfits such as Medea’s sculptural clothing and turban of writhing snakes.

 

Although it is playfully entertaining, this high concept but overwrought production suffers from style being more important than content, thereby diluting the tragedy of the ancient myth without elucidating story or illuminating characters, and lacks the poetic richness and heightened dialogue of Euripides’ dramatic text.

By Kate Herbert