◎ Weaver
Produced at the Zurich Theatre and directed by Leoni Bohm, Medea* is one of the ten most notable works at this year's Berlin Theatre Festival. The first thing that caught my attention was the little asterisk in the title, as if to imply that Medea was no longer the crazy killer woman of myth and tragedy, no longer the label and symbol we were familiar with, she was still a mystery, and she needed a footnote.
Contemporary theater reenacts Medea's story, and the artist usually makes a fuss about her two identities. The first identity is female. Not to defend Medea, but to admit that the act of killing children is gendered. Looking at ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literary and artistic works, men also want to kill their children, but men usually have a lofty reason for the great righteousness of the country. On the Greek expedition to Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia; for the sake of the Zhongliang Family's endless ancestral shrine, Cheng Infant exchanged his son for the Zhao orphans. And women killing children are usually portrayed as crazy lust. There is clearly a public/private, rational/irrational distinction here.
In contemporary theatre, especially in the creation of female artists, Medea is no longer seen as a hysterical mental case, and her anger and anguish are taken seriously. Medea's other identity was that of an outsider, an exile. Did she come from the barbaric Colcas to civilized Greece, and she was eventually expelled because people were afraid of the destructive power of her magic, or just because, as the so-called "non-my race, its heart must be different", she was always an "other"? As the problem of immigration and refugees in Europe has become more prominent in recent years, some directors have chosen to reconstruct the context of Medea's story from this perspective.
Medea* contains both of these issues, but goes further in form, and it no longer wants to repeat the story that has been told countless times over the course of 2500 years. In essence, it is just a monologue by Medea. In the one-and-a-half-hour performance, not only did not show the bloody and terrifying killing scene, but even the name Iason was not mentioned. It reminds me of Robert Wilson's great work, Hamlet: A Monologue, in which Hamlet is the only one on stage, and before he dies, he sketches his entire life with 15 alternate flashback scenes, as if it were happening in Hamlet's mind. If Hamlet: A Monologue is a spiritual look back at the dying, then Medea* is the mental process of a radical rebel before acting, the "generation" of Medea— because Medea was not born Medea.
Due to the impact of the epidemic, the stage scene and rehearsal method of "Medea*" were designed for online live broadcasting. The opening is a casual chant, sometimes out of tune, with a hoarse larynx, but not anger. We followed the camera footage through the layers of white fabrics around the ring, eventually targeting Medea, played by Maya Beckman, and musician Johannes Reid (who spoke to Medea as Medea's only friend in addition to the live accompaniment), who were singing "I really, really want you to die", which sounded too light-hearted and cheerful, not quite like a declaration of revenge. At the beginning of Euripides's tragedy, the uninformed Medea is emotionally at a critical point, the nanny has a premonition that she will be unfavorable to the two children, and we know exactly (and even expect) that she will inevitably go to the end of the killing; but this Medea, even when she clearly predicts in front of the camera, "I am Medea, I am going to kill my child", we can see her confusion, hesitation and uncertainty, she seems to be telling someone else's story, she is not ready to enter the prescribed role. Rather than provoking the audience's pity and fear with the ending of the killing, studying and showing the process of Medea becoming Medea is the focus of Medea*.
An important point in Brecht's theory of epic drama is to treat man as an object of study rather than a known one, as a process rather than a fixed point, because man is mutable and is changing. Medea's murder has often been attributed in the past to a vicious and cruel "nature", as the granddaughter of the sun god Helios, she is very human. In the tragedy of Euripides, the nanny says that Medea has a "violent temper, a hateful temperament", and even Medea herself says, "My temperament is too violent." Of course, there is also a gender distinction here, because men killing children are usually understood as specific acts in specific situations, the lesser of two evils, and we never condemn the cruelty of the "nature" of Agamemnon and Cheng Bao. However, did Medea really rebel against revenge because of her "nature"? Or is it only possible to rebel against revenge if he was born with the extraordinary temperament and ability of Medea?
Medea* shows us the learning process of an ordinary person. When the musician told Medea that "you will inflict irreparable harm on many people", Medea was confused: "But I am not evil at all, I am not evil at all." I don't have the power to be an evil person at all. "Except for a touch of blue on her forehead, this Medea does not show appearance, temperament, and ability beyond ordinary people. When she recalls her miraculous birth, how she devoured her mother and punished her father, this improvisational performance clip is too exaggerated and bizarre, not like evidence of Medea's superpowers, but rather like the wild imagination of civilized society for the "other". In fact, suddenly confronted with a shattered world, this Medea seems to have no idea how to re-establish the balance between the inside and the outside. Facing the camera, she once pinned her hopes on the kindness of strangers: "The doors that were once open for me are now closed, and I can no longer enter." My key won't fit into the keyhole anymore. Everyone else's key was still working, but I didn't know it, the lock had been changed. Will you accept me? I don't eat much. I will perform well. ”
The first step in Medea's "generation" is to learn to recognize and accept its own emotions. When the musician said she looked like an angry bull, she flatly denied: "I don't look like a bull at all." I wasn't angry at all. But then she admitted that deep down she had been insulted and that the anguished soul could not calm down at all. Then she tried to convince herself that she should remain calm and restrained, and the next moment she wanted the flames of heaven to split her. She oscillates between toughness and vulnerability, between anger and fear. She tried to compromise and obey. One of the scenes that I was particularly impressed with was when Medea said she would remain silent, "like a man who was defeated by the strong", reclining on her pillow and smiling flatteringly, as if someone was judging her across from her, and then she adjusted her posture, continued to smile, adjusted, smiled again... Finally, she couldn't laugh anymore, she was overwhelmed, she rolled over, buried her head in the pillow, and let out a low hiss—it was the voice of a suppressed soul.
The climax of the play is Medea's "Metamorphosis". She took off her long wig, put on a complicated robe with thorns on her back (was it the poison robe that killed the princess in legend), put on a bull's head cover—she finally became the angry bull she had resisted at first, her nostrils spewing smoke, and shouting in a low voice: "Now gather your courage and set out for that terrible thing!" You will see that those who have been above you will be defeated by you! However, she tried to take off her hood again, saying weakly: "My heart is full of fear, I am not suitable for this battle." The two voices continued to fight, and Medea glued between forward and backward. In this battle of willpower, there are countless moments when Medea almost can't become Medea, as long as she is a little weaker, a little more obedient, as long as she is afraid of the eyes of others, as long as she stays in the worldly sense of happy life, and does not listen to her inner demand for fairness and justice.
Medea finally erupted in a cry, and her large lines were appropriated from the messenger's description of the princess's death scene in Euripides's original work: blood and fire flowed from the head together, muscles flowed between the bones like pine resin tears, and flames soared into the air, illuminating the entire universe. This is death and life. Medea was reborn. When she finally lay on the ground, she said in a calm tone, "Now that everything is possible, I will kill my child, and this crime, I will bear it myself." "She no longer seems to be telling someone else's story, she's not crazy, she finds her own voice and speaks her own words.
Medea was not born Medea, Medea chose to become Medea in her studies. At the end of the play, when she comes out of the white "cocoon", we see the whole picture of that world - depressed, closed, but not completely without a way out, nor indestructible. Judging from the proportions of the stage space, Medea who comes out seems so small that she is going to face the wider world alone, as she said in the opening: "I am always one step ahead." Without Helios' dragon car picking her up in the air, Medea had to walk on her own. She walked step by step, looking back with occasional hesitation, and then, just in front of her, a flickering lamp appeared.
I was moved by this stage picture for a long time: a person, a road, a little light.
Courtesy photo/ Goethe-Institut (China)