Warner and Shaw's Medea

Abstract

What should we, as classicists, want from contemporary productions of ancient dramas? As scholars, we tend to be historicists: whether or not we locate the basis for interpretation in an author, we usually locate it in the original context, if only because that is our expertise and the basis for our authority. The study of tragedy has in recent years been dominated by new historicism, which places the plays firmly within the discursive world of fifth-century Athens. Typically, however, the more embedded the plays are in their own cultural discourse, the less immediately they speak within ours. Simultaneously, reception studies have flowered but do not provide much help in thinking about how our scholarly reception might or should interact with the theater. What do we hope productions will offer the broader public? What do we hope to learn from them for ourselves? A recent high-profile production of Medea invites such questions. 1 Warner and Shaw's Medea is filtered not through new historicism or even old historicism but through the miseries of contemporary divorce. (In a panel discussion at the University of Michigan, Shaw told anecdotes of divorcing couples who chopped up antique beds or gave away their spouse's wine cellars.) Generally favorably received by critics and audiences, it was severely criticized by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books. He calls it "vulgar, noisy, and uncomprehending" for its focus on the personal rather on the political. 2 Insisting that tragic women do not represent real women (or not just real women) but are "rather symbolic entities representing everything 'other' to that smoothly coherent citizen identity," Mendelsohn argues that "Warner's Euripides fails because it mistakes 'our' women for Euripides' women." As a [End Page 469] historicist, he objects that a production that ignores the political in the play thereby reduces it to domestic melodrama. There are at least two questions here. Whatever else Euripides' women were, Aristophanes shows plainly that members of the original audience thought they were representatives of real women. This Medea assumes that Euripides' women are near enough to our women. That is an acceptable working assumption. More troublesome is the other side of Mendelsohn's objection: that this production develops only one aspect of a complex play and is therefore reductive. That is undeniably true. Indeed, the reading of Euripides behind this production is in some ways perverse. Inevitably, as a scholar I feel troubled at having it offered to an audience as Euripides ("a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer"). And yet: the set (with the pool of water that has become so frequent in recent theater) is littered with concrete blocks, as if Jason and Medea were in the middle of a remodeling project when Jason left. We classicists are used to prior knowledge of our plays, but this production fights our tendency to see tragedy as enacting the already known. Just as the set is not finished, Medea is uncertain, and her ignorance of what she is going to do allows even the professional to indulge in the illusion of not knowing the outcome. (Whether or not Euripides invented the murder of the children, the original audience did not know exactly what would happen.) The first half is very funny. Medea herself seems intensely aware that there is something fundamentally ridiculous about passion and revenge. Shaw delivers lines, especially gnomes, with ironic distance, as if they were already clichés and she were already tired of them. Hence her Medea is not the one familiar to Classicists, the adherent of a typical male heroic code, but rather a woman who says these things because they are available, exhausted by the banality of her own suffering. Her self-consciousness is reminiscent of Seneca's Medea; however, she is not working towards a self that already exists, but hunting for an acceptable role to play. Educated moderns surely often have this experience of feeling trapped in situations where our emotions...