It's sometime after 3am on the first Saturday morning, and in a makeshift nursery cum dormitory, a group of pyjama-clad children are being stroked to sleep by hand-maidens after being fed hot chocolate.
Through a wall of people mere feet away, an argument is in motion between the childrens' parents. Barely able to keep their eyes open but shaken from their slumber anyway, the children attempt to tune in on snatches of raised voices and grown-up things they can't fully understand anyway. The feuding couple in question are the legendary Jason and Medea, and we, the audience, are their teddy-bear clutching offspring, caught in the crossfire of wars both personal and political.
This is Hotel Medea, a six-hour contemporary rendering of the sexiest and most brutal of Greek myths as thrillingly reinvented by the Anglo-Brazilian theatre explorers Zecora Ura, who from midnight till
6am embark on an immersive promenade through emotional and theatrical extremes. As the audience become central to the action, scenes such as the one described above are deeply affecting studies of the most intimate effects of conflicts great and small.
The first of the show's three parts begins festively enough, with a percussion-led mardi-gras and rudimentary dance classes before the fun really starts as Jason and his Argonauts go off in search of the much sought-after golden fleece.
Jason is an obnoxious Danny Dyer-like wide-boy Brit abroad, while his Argonauts are a regiment of women sporting crash helmets, baseball bats and chains. Over the next two hours the barrier between performer and audience blurs in a maelstrom of furiously-charged rituals, from war to weddings, all fueled by the infectious club sounds of DJ Dolores. As Jason and Medea move from enemies to lovers, the action is hot, sweaty and erotically charged. Even here, however, there are dark portents of cultural colonialism, with Persis-Jade Maravala's Medea fetishised as the ultimate white boy's prize.
This becomes explicit in the second part, in which Jason the conquering warrior has turned slimeball career politician playing away with a younger, blonder and infinitely less complicated model while his now neglected bride stays at home. That's when the audience become Medea's doomed children or else become embroiled in some sycophantic pre-election focus group for Jason, whose immigration policies alone are frighteningly familiar.
By the time we enter into the third and final part sometime before dawn, it's the sex wars that have taken precedence, as Medea performs in a gender-bending rad-fem cabaret club. It's the final scenes that
prove most harrowing, though; as a violated Medea leads a processional as evocative as any modern day public display of grieving.
Five years in the making, Jorge Lopes Ramos and Maravala's production is an astonishingly realised piece of work that takes in aspects of the public and the private, politics and patriarchy, misogyny, motherhood and, ultimately, the power of defiance. The way body and mind are wrung emotionally and physically overnight stimulates a near lysergic set of responses as it goes.
If it weren't for the sheer unfettered fearlessness of the performances, however, none of this would matter. James Turpin's Jason is corrupt on every level. As Medea's brother, Urias de Oliveira is a ball of diabolic energy. But it's Maravala's Medea who leaves a lump in the throat in a relentless, no holds barred display in this utterly unmissable, deeply profound and heartbreaking treatise on love and war.
After all that, Steven Berkoff's version of Oedipus can't help but look conventional. Not that there isn't a sinewy dynamism to Berkoff's own production, in which, like the last of the great actor managers, he
plays old king Creon as some sunkissed godfather to Simon Merrells' gold-chain sporting Oedipus. As a figurehead to the common people, here a flat-capped chorus lined up behind a long table in a series of
tableaux that look part Last Supper, part L.S. Lowry, Oedipus' political certainties are knocked for six by private indiscretions he'syet to become aware of, let alone comprehend.
The mists start to clear on Anita Dobson's entrance as Jocasta, which sees Dobson waft voluminously into play in a slow-burner of a show that looks to ancient Japanese influences as much as the Greek which Berkoff now prefers to play straight rather than the heroic cockneyfications that first made his name.
Berkoff's virtuosic flourishes remain, however, and the ensemble performances are all expertly realised, with an expansive sense of concentration that puts heart and soul into every stretch of the fingertips that accompanies each chewily ennunciated phrase. While this puts paid to the suspicion that Berkoff could knock this sort of thing out in his sleep, he's been doing it so long, there are no surprises either in what nevertheless remains a masterclass of Berkoffian technique.
The Herald, August 9th 2011
ends
Through a wall of people mere feet away, an argument is in motion between the childrens' parents. Barely able to keep their eyes open but shaken from their slumber anyway, the children attempt to tune in on snatches of raised voices and grown-up things they can't fully understand anyway. The feuding couple in question are the legendary Jason and Medea, and we, the audience, are their teddy-bear clutching offspring, caught in the crossfire of wars both personal and political.
This is Hotel Medea, a six-hour contemporary rendering of the sexiest and most brutal of Greek myths as thrillingly reinvented by the Anglo-Brazilian theatre explorers Zecora Ura, who from midnight till
6am embark on an immersive promenade through emotional and theatrical extremes. As the audience become central to the action, scenes such as the one described above are deeply affecting studies of the most intimate effects of conflicts great and small.
The first of the show's three parts begins festively enough, with a percussion-led mardi-gras and rudimentary dance classes before the fun really starts as Jason and his Argonauts go off in search of the much sought-after golden fleece.
Jason is an obnoxious Danny Dyer-like wide-boy Brit abroad, while his Argonauts are a regiment of women sporting crash helmets, baseball bats and chains. Over the next two hours the barrier between performer and audience blurs in a maelstrom of furiously-charged rituals, from war to weddings, all fueled by the infectious club sounds of DJ Dolores. As Jason and Medea move from enemies to lovers, the action is hot, sweaty and erotically charged. Even here, however, there are dark portents of cultural colonialism, with Persis-Jade Maravala's Medea fetishised as the ultimate white boy's prize.
This becomes explicit in the second part, in which Jason the conquering warrior has turned slimeball career politician playing away with a younger, blonder and infinitely less complicated model while his now neglected bride stays at home. That's when the audience become Medea's doomed children or else become embroiled in some sycophantic pre-election focus group for Jason, whose immigration policies alone are frighteningly familiar.
By the time we enter into the third and final part sometime before dawn, it's the sex wars that have taken precedence, as Medea performs in a gender-bending rad-fem cabaret club. It's the final scenes that
prove most harrowing, though; as a violated Medea leads a processional as evocative as any modern day public display of grieving.
Five years in the making, Jorge Lopes Ramos and Maravala's production is an astonishingly realised piece of work that takes in aspects of the public and the private, politics and patriarchy, misogyny, motherhood and, ultimately, the power of defiance. The way body and mind are wrung emotionally and physically overnight stimulates a near lysergic set of responses as it goes.
If it weren't for the sheer unfettered fearlessness of the performances, however, none of this would matter. James Turpin's Jason is corrupt on every level. As Medea's brother, Urias de Oliveira is a ball of diabolic energy. But it's Maravala's Medea who leaves a lump in the throat in a relentless, no holds barred display in this utterly unmissable, deeply profound and heartbreaking treatise on love and war.
After all that, Steven Berkoff's version of Oedipus can't help but look conventional. Not that there isn't a sinewy dynamism to Berkoff's own production, in which, like the last of the great actor managers, he
plays old king Creon as some sunkissed godfather to Simon Merrells' gold-chain sporting Oedipus. As a figurehead to the common people, here a flat-capped chorus lined up behind a long table in a series of
tableaux that look part Last Supper, part L.S. Lowry, Oedipus' political certainties are knocked for six by private indiscretions he'syet to become aware of, let alone comprehend.
The mists start to clear on Anita Dobson's entrance as Jocasta, which sees Dobson waft voluminously into play in a slow-burner of a show that looks to ancient Japanese influences as much as the Greek which Berkoff now prefers to play straight rather than the heroic cockneyfications that first made his name.
Berkoff's virtuosic flourishes remain, however, and the ensemble performances are all expertly realised, with an expansive sense of concentration that puts heart and soul into every stretch of the fingertips that accompanies each chewily ennunciated phrase. While this puts paid to the suspicion that Berkoff could knock this sort of thing out in his sleep, he's been doing it so long, there are no surprises either in what nevertheless remains a masterclass of Berkoffian technique.
The Herald, August 9th 2011
ends
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