Medea: NHB Classic Plays

Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her original stage plays include Thon Man Molière, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone).
Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

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A Student Edition of Euripides' play, which accessibly unpacks Greek tragedy in its social context, issues of translation and adaptation, and performance approaches over the centuries.

Euripides' play Medea was first produced in 431BC and continues to be produced globally to this day. Its power and timeless appeal for audiences rests in its portrait of a woman driven to murder the new wife of the man who abandoned her and to murder her own children. In more recent times, Medea's actions have been taken as a symbol of female power in an otherwise male-dominated society.

Will Shüler's commentary in this Student Edition looks at the violence of the play - both onstage and off; the original performance conditions; staging challenges, both then and now (including Medea's exit on a dragon); the notion of myth and how Greek tragedians were telling old stories to get new meanings; and how the play has evolved through translation.

It considers a range of productions up to the present day, including the 2014 National Theatre production directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Helen McCrory; Sophie Okonedo as Medea at the Soho Theatre, London, in 2023; and the 2000 Australian version, Black Medea, which interpreted Medea as an indigenous woman brought to a city by her ambitious husband.

One of the most powerful and enduring of Greek tragedies, Medea centers on the myth of Jason, leader of the Argonauts, who has won the dragon-guarded treasure of the Golden Fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. Having married Medea and fathered her two children, Jason abandons her for a more favorable match, never suspecting the terrible revenge she will take. Euripides' masterly portrayal of the motives fiercely driving Medea's pursuit of vengeance for her husband's insult and betrayal has held theater audiences spellbound for more than twenty centuries. Rex Warner's authoritative translation brings this great classic of world literature vividly to life.

Chronology

Contexts (ritual; myth as storytelling; multiple plays performed at one time; audience and performer experience including collective spectacle; didactic)

Themes (gender; motherhood; feminism, including contemporary perspectives; political power; family)

Play in Performance (Aristotle's Poetics; dramatic structure; space of a Greek tragic theatre; acoustics; violence onstage and offstage; theatre design)

Text, Transmission, and Translation (How did this text survive until now? What are approaches to translation? What does this translation emphasise? What are the potentials for "translating" the play from page to stage?)

Play in performance (how various playwrights and theatre-makers have adapted the material including the 2014 NT production directed by Carrie Cracknell; the 2023 production at the Soho Theatre, London; the 2000 production in Australia, Black Medea; and Cherrie Moraga's 1995 adaptation The Hungry Woman, which was a queer re-telling of the play.)

PLAY TEXT

Notes