The choice of plays by young companies honing their skills usually speaks volumes for their judgement and calculated risk taking, and on this front Bluepatch score highly for their production of Neil LaBute’s Medea Redux which was given a third airing on International Women’s Day in Smock Alley as a fundraiser for Women’s Aid.
The play does what it says on the tin, as it were: a familiar Greek tragedy given a contemporary twist and concise enactment (a mere forty minutes), and the inherent device of knowing the general outcome, if not the details, in advance is finely handled by US playwright and film maker LaBute and the play given a well attuned and distinctive performance by the company.
The play opens with a young woman (Aoife Connolly) seated confidently at a table which displays a tape recorder and an ashtray. Her posture indicates she is about to speak. Is it in confidence to a friend, a declaration to a lawyer, a policeman or a remembering to herself or to us the audience? This is confessional theatre and usually treated as a monologue. Bluepatch, under Connolly’s direction has splintered that lone voice so that the narrative is now given three different performance perspectives. She is joined by her collaborators, Andrea Scott and musician Aisling Quinn, who remain standing throughout, in different corners of the space, each relating and confirming a different strand of the story. Occasionally all speak together in a brief gesture to an otherwise absent Greek chorus which adds to the theatricality of the work, particularly where one of the voices (Quinn) doubles as a spontaneous musical riff, breaking into phrases of songs which are referenced in the text.
Far from the classicism of ancient Corinth we are now, in the modern setting of a mid-west US Junior High School and a reference to a local popular TV show ‘Hogans Heroes’ ironically distances us from the mythical heroes of ancient Greece. Here the ‘Medea' themes of rejection and revenge revolve around an inappropriate pupil/teacher relationship and the ensuing fallout which LaBute ultimately parallels with the original of Euripedes. Feelings of abandonment and repressed anger motivate a cool determination to exact revenge. This narrative is served well by the actors who easily inhabit the text, sounding appropriately girlish, impressionable, even happily flattered at the start, but the carefree confiding tone fades as the antiheroine’s character grows in strength and determination. At that point, the actors almost become a Greek chorus; the pace gains momentum and they relate unemotionally the unfolding of the events which lead to the signalled sacrifice and tragedy.
Bluepatch remain faithful to the classical style here and strip the setting back to essentials, apart from well judged lighting and a few clever modern details (dangling mic's and cigarette boxes for the quirky synchronised smoking phases which punctuate the performance.) But the mood is suitably tense and the director understands that this uncluttered stage focuses attention on the unravelling of fateful events and underlines the voice and body of the performers.
The production was initially created as a site-specific theatre piece in the beer garden of the GB Shaw pub in Dublin in August 2009 and I expected that with the transfer to Smock Alley they might have taken advantage of more opportunities with the staging. Occasionally I strained to hear Aisling Quinn (admittedly competing with offstage sirens on the streets outside) on account of the angle and position she had taken in the space and as her vocal strength seems to be in song not words, fragments of her story were swallowed in the towering frame of Smock Alley. A little more deftness here and there and this production would have sung even more sweetly.
Seona MacRéamoinn is a journalist and critic.