Some great foot-tapping music and singing, but shame about the words! Rating
Good
It is always brave to tackle an emotionally powerful story like Medea and adapt it to a different setting and, more importantly here, a new genre, namely a musical. Naturally it has been done before: a gay musical version on Broadway, dance, stand-up comic, various translations and reinterpretations, feminist, political, across the whole range of media. But what connects them all is the visceral story of a central woman wronged, seeking revenge on her husband who has abandoned her and her two children to marry Corinthean king Creon’s daughter Glauce. Her revenge is total, murdering Creon and Glauce and to rub salt into Jason’s wound she triumphantly kills her two children. As you can see, pretty heady stuff and therefore a challenge.
This version, in a short run revival from its premiere at the Camden Fringe a year ago, is by Costas Hassabis, who has written book, music and lyrics and that is all the programme says about him, which is a shame. He has set his cast of seven actor-muso’s in a sixties pub called The Argo (geddit?) and as the audience arrives we are in a jamming session. It starts promisingly as Flo Lunnon as Medea enters with her flute – and Lunnon is a mean flautist – reflecting well Medea as sorceress with magical powers putting her audience under a spell. Maybe because the style of music Hassabis has chosen is folk, at least to start with (later it gets full on folk rock), the vibe is slightly fey – all I got was Mary Hopkins, not helped by Lunnon interpreting Medea as a suburban Felicity Kendall. Admittedly, the book itself is so clunky, it’s not true. All I could hear was the writer’s voice throughout and not the characters’. And why couldn’t the group, on stage all the time, be used as a kind of Greek chorus, crucial in the original Euripides play, making sense of the idea of the pre-show, which was abandoned for the rest of the play.
This is such a shame because the actual music is incredibly well sung and played by this talented group and it is thrilling to hear the sound they produce, especially in the a cappella singing. They are all impressively versatile – Alistair Higgins as Jason on piano, Jon Bonner as Creon on guitars and harmonica (why wasn’t it used more??), Felix Gillingwater as an OTT Aegeus on accordion & piano, Caoimhe De Brún as the Sister on violin, Gracie Lai as Housekeeper on clarinet and beat box, and last but not least, as he is also the brilliant MD for the whole project, Thomas Fabian Parrish on piano. I almost wish this could be rewritten as a through-sung piece because frankly the book was so dire and the standard of acting was first year drama school level. All shouting, emoting and snarling “signifying nothing”.
And to cap it all, we don’t get the murder of her two children which is key to the whole emotional journey we go on with Medea – how does a mother get to such a point that she goes and kills her own children? We didn’t even get a vague reference to their slaughter; instead, apparently they are going with her to her new life with Aegeus in Athens. I’m sorry I find that inexplicable, as this is where the moral debate about Medea as a person really gets interesting.
So, it is with a heavy heart I say the book lets down terribly this version of Medea, but the music, singing and playing rescues it from two stars – but only just!
Writer, Composer, Lyricist: Costas Hassabis
Director: Tara Noonan
Musical Arrangements: Thomas F. Arnold
Musical Director: Thomas Fabian Parrish
Set & Costume: Hannah Danson
Lighting: Toby Ison
Sound: Sam Thornton
The Musical Medea runs at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until Sunday 4 October.
