BEIRUT: Can you identify with a multiple murderess? “Medea,” a new play directed by Carole Abboud and performed by Lebanese-German actress Dana Mikhail, asks the audience to do just that. The play, which opened Monday at Hamra’s Babel Theater, features Arabic transations of extracts from several modern texts based on the Medea myth, combined with short texts Mikhail herself has written, in an effort to show that violence can be justified.
“People should come out and have the feeling: ‘I can defend my rights. I can use violence when I have to ... I can be really the dark side of myself and then show you the other side if I want to,’” says Mikhail, who dedicated the performance to her friend Zaid Abi Azar, who was drowned in a tragic accident earlier this week.
Medea’s character appears in several ancient Greek plays and myths as the wife of the hero Jason, with whom she has two sons. There are many variations of the Medea story, but she is generally agreed to have killed her own brother while absconding with Jason. Subsequently, when Jason attempts to abandon her for Glauce, the king of Corinth’s daughter, she avenges this betrayal by killing Glauce with a poisoned dress. Then she murders her own children.
The betrayed and vengeful Medea has captured the imagination of many modern playwrights, and appears in several avant-garde scripts. Some of these were used by Abboud and Mikhail in “Medea,” which features a translation of Heiner Müller’s “Despoiled shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts.” The script also draws on extracts from texts by Franca Rame and Dario Fo, Christa Wolf, Franz Grillparzer, Ursula Haas and Ulrike Meinhof – the German militant who tried to kidnap her children.
Mikhail became fascinated by Medea’s character after reading Müller’s experimental text. “The whole Müller play is very important to me,” she says. “I mean Medea in love with Jason who doesn’t love her anymore. This happens so often and I’ve lived it also – to be in love with a person and he is not in love with you.”
Müller’s play places Medea in a modern world, polluted and inhospitable. Mikhail, who grew up between Germany and Lebanon, says it reminded her of the no man’s land between the walls in Berlin, and the events of the Lebanese Civil War. “It was very appealing to me,” she says, “and so I thought: Okay I have to do something with it.”
Abboud and Mikhail’s “Medea” retains much of Müller’s famously fragmentary style. It combines Mikhail’s onstage monologues with video projections, sound clips and pre-recorded speech, creating a series of isolated, non-linear episodes depicting Medea in several incarnations. “We wanted to make a collage,” Mikhail says, “a pattern, like zapping into her life.”
Müller was profoundly influenced by Bertolt Brecht and the effect of this formal fragmentation is at once visually interesting and emotionally jarring. In true Brechtian style, it constantly reminds the audience that what they are watching is a construct, preventing them from identifying with the character the actress is portraying.
He was also inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, which aimed to make the audience face a reality they might otherwise not want to see. “Medea” retains an element of this intellectual confrontation, an attempt to communicate a difficult truth, even if doing so makes the audience feel uncomfortable.
Notwithstanding the text’s anti-Aristotelian leanings, Mikhail wants viewers to have more than a cerebral response to the material. She intends that audiences identify with these various depictions of Medea. “We’re going to work on it even more,” she says, “to make a platform for people to really project themselves into it.”
The performance makes use of the theater’s ample stage space, with video images being projected against every surface – first the backdrop and stage itself, later against the hall’s lateral walls, and even upon the face of the small central plinth, the sole piece of scenery on the expanse of white stage.
These projections vary in style. The first sequence appears an attempt to capture the experience of dying. It combines a sound clip of a regular thudding beat alongside an electrical background meep, like that of a hospital monitor, with video footage of a visceral, pulsing mass of red light and shadow, reminiscent of a beating heart.
Other projections experiment with color, black-and-white and negative images, and play with static and moving footage. One particularly effective clip features a flock of birds which appear to fly on and off stage; a couple of stragglers follow behind several seconds later, alone in the expanse of projected sky.
The compilation of fragmented texts makes the play difficult to follow at first, although gradually links between the women in the various extracts begin to become clearer. The material of the text itself is emotionally charged – dealing with issues of murder, terrorism, love and betrayal – yet, it being a one-woman play, there is no character interaction, and little more between Mikhail and the audience. This makes it difficult to emote.
Medea is certainly a destructive character but, as Mikhail says, “she destroys so much of herself too at the same time ... She has no anchor to the past because she has destroyed everything with her father and she has no anchor to the future because she has nothing.
“She is abandoned,” she continues. “So she stands really in the middle of the present moment and just says, ‘F**k you all. It’s because of you that this is all happening.’”
Following Medea in her various incarnations is not a very uplifting experience but perhaps it is worth undergoing. If you enjoy experimental drama that enters through the head and remains there, then this may be the play for you.
If, on the other hand, you prefer a more traditional narrative that lures you into an emotional connection with the characters, you may find this play cold and inaccessible, in spite of its technical accomplishments.
Carole Abboud and Dana Mikhail’s “Medea” is on show at 8.30 p.m. at the Babel Theatre in Hamra until Feb. 24. For more information please call 01-744-033.