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Review: Medea (1983), A Doll’s House (Garland 1973)

Image source: IMBd

Mark Cullingham’s 1983 TV movie Medea is based on Euripides’ treatment of the myth in his enduring, ancient Greek tragedy of the same name. An outsider and Barbarian, the sorceress Medea (Zoe Caldwell) calculates revenge when the King of Corinth gives his daughter's hand in marriage to Medea's husband Jason (Mitchell Ryan), also exiling her and her two children.

The visually minimalistic set is reminiscent of an ancient Greek amphitheatre. Several stone steps form a platform on the main stage. These steps lead to a grand, skene-like, double-door entrance. Similar steps are on both sides of the double doors like parodos and a seat-like stone central to Cullingham's stage that Cullingham’s characters stand on, sit on and at times, weep on. Time of day and a plein air is affected by ominous lighting changes. Although main characters would have performed from in front of the skene in Euripedes’ day, only Medea enters and leaves through it which I think is an effective choice visually. Whilst we watch the Nurse and chorus interact during the prologue, we cannot help but wonder what awaits behind the doors and when they will open. Caldwell’s eventual appearance through them as Medea, dressed in a distinct, dark purple dress with a scarlet throw, is hair-raising. From the skene, she coronates the set with an inescapable heaviness that grips you until the end. Imagination fills in the rest of the period setting without allows us to focus on Robinson Jeffer’s rich script. I think this production is better off without a full setting: the words are the action and the setting is moreso the rattled mind of Medea than Corinth.

Zoe Caldwell does not just play Medea but appears to become her mind, body and soul. Her face and voice are used to great effect, but what I will not forget is her gestural performance. It is brilliantly uncomfortable to watch her body and arms awkwardly contort with grief and her laboured breathing. The viewer perhaps feels as though they are witnessing  a private, domestic breakdown. Some viewers may not appreciate that the Athenian audience was xenaphobic and patriarchal and that in reality, a foreign woman exiled alone with two children was as good as a death sentence. “I am undone, I have resigned all joy in life, and I want to die,” (255) says Medea in the Kovacs translation. Even still, viewers will get a strong sense of the depth of her trauma just from her physical performance, which again, is not unlike the first Grecian actors who were required to perform very physically from behind masks to crowds of possibly 15, 000. Caldwell is very well supported in the rest of the cast, especially by Dame Judith Anderson’s Nurse who brings all the sensitivity of maturity and no doubt a strong sensibility from her own Tony award-winning portrayal of Medea in 1947.

With the same cast, this production of Medea ran successfully at New York’s Cort Theatre in 1982 with what appears to be very similar staging. However, Cullingham seizes the opportunity to elevate the viewing experience through delicate and well-considered camerawork. In ancient Greece, the chorus, made up of around twelve actors, would perform from a section of the amphitheater called the orchestra between the skene and the audience. Their parts were sung and very heavily choreographed. Stood between the main actors and the audience, they were able to interact with either. In this film, it is the camera that seems to dance, especially with the chorus of three, between the actors and stand in for the viewer. At times, we feel that we are standing with the chorus looking on in fear, apprehension, sympathy and horror. At other times, we are staring into Medea’s glistening eyes, reading her thoughts. Unlike theatre, it allows Cullingham to amplify one character’s point of view over another’s at any given time.

So, how does Euripides handle identity in his treatment of the myth of Medea? In episode one of the play, Medea delivers the famous speech to the chorus in her first, onstage acknowledgement of her circumstances (“I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once”).Ironically, non-Athenians and women were not allowed in the audience of plays in Euripides’ day and only male actors could portray the characters, yet Euripides explores how relationships and status affect a collective perception of an individual’s identity, specifically of a foreign woman who has been abandoned. “I trust you that much the less than before,” says Creon to Medea in pronouncing her exile. When she was still within the security of her marriage to Jason, Medea was only just, if not, a lesser trusted member of the community, especially to the ruling patriarchy who have the power to affect her place there. Outside of her marriage to Jason, she has noone “to shelter [her] from this calamity” (255) and is regarded like a dangerous, undocumented person in the modern world.

Euripides also seems to make the point that the strengths a woman might hold are regarded as a liability even in vulnerability. It is arguable whether Medea would have committed the same crimes had she been treated with more compassion by Jason and Creon, but this is still clear: Creon says that “a clever woman who keeps her own counsel” is more dangerous than “a hot-tempered man” (320). While this very well may be true, the inequality is audible. Would Medea be treated with more compassion if she was not a sorceress? Creon is rewarding Jason with his daughter’s hand in marriage for the exploits that Medea was instrumental in and is exiled as a result. Euripides seems to be saying that either way, she cannot win.

Through Medea’s speech, Euripides also contemplates the collective identity of women in general and how it is molded by the powers that be. “And the outcome of our life's striving hangs on this, whether we take a bad or a good husband” (235). Although she is more than the average mortal, the powerful sorceress is able to identify completely with women by virtue of being a woman. In her explosive exposition of the position and prospects of a woman in a patriarchal society, Medea’s pinpointing of all the forces at work pulling and pushing against her cause the audience to ask, “then, what is a woman?” Therefore, the identity of women is presented as a question that is left unresolved even by the climactic end in which Medea is arguably vindicated.

What I find most striking about how identity is presented in this episode and throughout the whole play is that Medea presents herself. It is as though Euripides lets her speak for herself to define to us who and what she is even in her damaging circumstances, rather than defining who she is for us. Even the prologue in which the Nurse provides extensive background about the character of Medea serves as a sympathetic set up for our first introduction to the character. In this way, identity is presented as an aspect of the self that can only be fully presented by the self. And I think this is the great strength of the play.

This review was written with background reference to “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy” by Edith Hall, “Ancient Greek Theatre” by Sarah Grocola and Playbill’s profile of Medea (1982).