[Music] come lay your plan media sche with all your skill onto the deadly moment that shall test your nerve one of the myths about the use of myth in Greek Theater is that they were all fixed that they had a kind of Robert Graves or an encyclopedia they go and look it up and there was a fixed version of the myth and then the poor old dramatist had to sit down and and make a plan out of that it's not like that at all myths were very variable they were told in many different ways and told in many different forms there was no such thing as a a fixed version of The Myth we know that there were stories of media of course of her going off with Jason of her coming to Corinth and there were even stories of the death of her children but it doesn't look as if before ureides media herself killed the children so Ides has taken that raw material and made the absolutely vital crucial change of having media the mother herself kill her own children now for us now that is the essence of the media story of course that she's the woman who kills her own children U but europees was was innovating he was he was changing and I think this this flexibility this this reminder that the raw material can be changed can can be seen in a different way can be told in a different way is a kind of model for modern Productions that we we have the basic material but we're always turning it we're always trying to see it from a different angle we're always trying to tell the story in a different way although the myth of Meda who kills her children appears very simple in fact the way that her myth has been received since the Middle Ages and since the media was first printed in the Renaissance is rather a complicated story [Music] it seems to me that it offers an extremely rich and complex number of possible emotional interpretations within it and I think that's one of the secrets of this mths [Music] longevity in staging media we may feel instinctively that we should be authentic but what would a so-called authentic production involve I'm not quite sure what an authentic approach to reducing Greek tragedy today really means I mean after all your audience is never going to be authentic your audience is not an audience of fifth century Athenians it's an audience of today therefore it seems to me however you do the play it's got to be a way that is effective to today's audience that speaks to today's audience audience but that's not actually to say that you just completely rewrite it in modern terms that you you turn media into um into a psychodrama for example because um if the plays of the past are worth putting on at all then there are things in them that are different from today's preoccupations as well as the same as today's preoccupations and I think that's the way I would see the value for a modern day producer thinking about the way it was originally produced you can go and stand in the very spot in Athens in the theater of dianis beneath the Acropolis where Ides media and all the other great tragedies of the Great era of tragedy in the 5th Century BC were first put on and you can stand and look around there and say this is exactly where it was on the other hand because it was the original theater it was a kind of place of pilgrimage Ag and so it got rebuilt again and again and again so what you are actually surrounded by as you stand in the theater of dyis is remain spread over about 700 years of people coming along and saying I think I'll reconstruct it a bit I think I'll change it a bit so that hardly a single stone that you see was standing in the spot where it is now when Ides media was first put on in that case what did the space medad was played in actually look like about 75 miles from Athens is the theater at epidaurus it was built some years after ID's death and we don't know for sure that media was performed here but we do know that this theater was not rebuilt and shows all the main features of the kind of space ureides wrote for there's a slope where the audience sat and at the bottom of the slope the large circular area known as the orista though the modern word Orchestra comes from this here it originally meant a place for dancing it's where the chorus and sometimes the actors perform at the far side of the orchestra is the stage building or SK not much of this survives but using a fragment of a vas painting we can recreate what it might have been like [Music] and finally the side roads called the paroi it was here that many of the entrances and exits took [Music] place this is basically the stage space for all the tragedies of the fifth century and here too we have all the elements of a Greek theater seats Orchestra stage building but this isn't Greece it's rural barkshire carved out of a chalk pit in the 1890s this theater has been in continual use by the staff and students of Bradfield college for the performance of Greek tragedies is this one possible authentic approach pant [Applause] let's stop there okay then you're going straight into har you get the this lovely Rhythm okay so can we try that please from har one two all our plays have performed in Greek which might seem a bit odd given that uh most of our casts don't speak it and certainly most of the audience don't but the Greek language itself has you know such a resonance and makes such a gorgeous noise when it's spoken on stage I mean that the language fairly fizzes and cracks along Nike titis and logos another reason why we do do it in Greek is because it makes Bradfield unique as being the only place where you can see a Greek play in ancient Greek in a Greek th C doing these things in ancient Greek is fun students love it I think everybody who's interested in Greek tragedy should try and get to see one at least in their lifetime having said that I feel that we're going to reproduce the role of these plays in society doing them in a good clear and um or inspiring translation and emotionally and spiritually affecting translation into our own language is much more likely to make us understand what these plays meant to the Ancients and um I'm a great advocate of performance in modern translation still you can treat me like a woman who's witless my heart's made of Speer and as I have stated whether you like it or not there's agamon this is the sword hand that brought him to blood rights I hack down my husband that I would say give your actors time to work with an English version to work with the expressiveness of something in in our own language but I could see at the same time there is a problem of of translation I mean Madar actually has not been very I can't think of a really good translation of media that I could really strongly recommend it's not like with the arre where Peter Hall managed to to get Tony Harrison to produce a a uniquely special and Powerful translation for that production now you're ready with banishment Exile the people's hatred and public damnation and how did you punish this murderer here meant as little to him a slaughtering cattle his sheep phones were bursting he butchered his she child the she child I labored to launch on her LIF lot as some specious God sop to settle a storm Squall you should have banished him for pollution but it's now that you start to play a Stern J even though it's a translation the use of stylized English might help us get closer to the spirit of the original text and there are other so-called authentic elements here too a large chorus masks and an all male cast as they would have been in ID's day I've seen some very successful modern professional Productions of Greek tragedy which have taken one or two of the conventions of the ancient Theater which are not commonly used in the modern Western theater anyway and use them to very great effect in the modern theater one is to take just the mask and I think that some of the Peter Hall Productions with their beautiful masks have very successfully brought out the estranging effect of the mask that somehow the actor behind it his own identity is submerged and by the very simple act of putting on a mask certain kinds of different movements come about certain more stylized and more if you like universally readable gestures if you go for a larger more stylized acting style such as ancient Greek tragedies must have had if you just think of the size of the theater that alone tells you you can't deal with tiny little gestures whereas in film of course the the tiniest little twitch of a hand or or twitch of a of an eyelid can can speak volumes but we're not dealing with that kind of theater we can see the logic of this a large space requires big gestures Men playing women might need to be masked but what's the historical evidence I once showed to a colleague who works in Shakespeare studies some of the bars paintings that are related to the Greek Theater and he said my God if only we' got evidence like that for The Shakespearean theater we'd know so much more than we do we've got quite a lot of vses that are interestingly related to the Greek Theater [Music] as well as the archaeological evidence there's another very important kind of evidence for the kind of experience and the kind of visual picture that Greek tragedy presented and that's comedy comedy is fascinated with the theater it's fascinated with itself and it's fascinated with tragedy which is its kind of older serious sister and never hesitates to make fun of tragedy to exploit tragedy and it also likes to take the Mickey out of staging aspects of tragedy there were two rather curious bits of Machinery that tragedy developed uh and which comedy liked to make fun of one is is a kind of trolley a kind of floor on wheels that was rolled out of the door in order to reveal terrible scenes of what had happened inside a kind of it's a kind of Revelation trolley and out it would come with corpses and scenes of terrible Slaughter on it comedy can't resist having people wield out on this trolley there's a play in which somebody comes to visit edes and says come outside and see me edes and eures says I'm sorry I'm too busy writing plays and so he says all right get yourself wheeled out on the trolley so that's a way ues can come outside and still be at his writing desk another piece of Machinery that to us may seem even more absurd was a crane they could they just they just call it the machine which lifted characters up above the scene building I say characters but it's almost entirely for the use of gods because that area above the scene is the area of the Gods it's the upper air when Jason comes rushing to the palace and is told that media has killed the children he says open the doors so that I can see this terrible villainous woman this terrible awful sight and that is a cue for this trolley to be rolled out and the audience must be expecting the scene of media standing there among her dead [Music] children instead what happens is that this crane the Mec in Greek is brought into use and instead of appearing in the doorway medier appears above in The Chariot of her grandfather the son this historic performance of media successfully combined some of the traditional elements of the Greek Theater with stylized features of the Japanese Kabuki [Applause] tradition one of the advantages in going to see a Greek tragedy either in ancient Greek or in a language like say jaes that uh one doesn't actually understand is that one has to focus very hard indeed on what's going on in other production ways particularly gesture movement costume masking or non-m masking and so on and one of the revelatory things to me about watching the ninagawa production was the way that the actor playing Mia used his voice going up and down the hill especially in the big soliloquies as a sort of operatic or rhetorical use of the entire voice over a couple of octaves which really made you hear the speech as an emotional sound statement rather than the actual content of the words the other thing was I found his use of his back and his arms and the hunching and the way that misery and anger were brought out was really quite devastating and I think it's suggestive of what a great actor in ancient Athens might have done I think we may be getting closer to the ancient acting Stars by watching the nagawa production we think of theater as something you go to in the evening to relax between work and going home it's something that runs in Repertory the whole time you can go to the theater any day you want it's rather different in ancient Athens all the surviving Greek tragedies we've got are actually Athenian tragedies and they all except one of them come from the fifth century they were performed in Athens at festivals in honor of the god dianis and they simultaneously Civic events and profoundly religious events it looks as if perhaps as many as half of all the citizens in the whole of Athens and ateka which of course is a a big area of Countryside all around Athens as many as half might have gone to the Theater which is extraordinary if you think of even a middle-sized British town getting half the people in all that town out to a single occasion maybe half the people in that town might watch some royal wedding or some football match on the television but to get half of them out into the same Civic space into the same area to participate in a communal occasion is something that's actually quite remote from our experience now when I say the community though one's got to remember of course that ancient lens had slaves they wouldn't come to the theater and that women were not citizens in the full sense of the word and at the very least this audience is predominantly a male audience personally I believe it was an exclusively male audience and that lines it if you like with the meetings of the democratic assembly with the meetings of the Law Courts these are huge Gatherings of the male citizens of Athens and I think the theater 2 is a gathering of of the male citizens of Athens where they put themselves through an experience which no one would want to undergo in everyday life instead they lay aside a special Festival time to explore both the most terrible aspects of human existence in their tragedies and the most ridiculous aspects of human existence in their comedies the M was played in front of the massed Athenian citizenry and it's important to try and consider what its major preoccupations were in order to um understand and illuminate some of the aspects of the play which perhaps don't engage our emotional um sympathies quite as much as as they should the first is that the Athenian citizens gave themselves a lot of Privileges and these privileges were guarded with an almost paranoid anxiety they could only be passed on to legitimate sons of citizens which meant that legitimacy of birth was of extraordinary importance in Athens after 451 BC which is 20 years before the media Pericles had passed a law that meant you had to prove that not only your father but also your mother were of authentic Athenian citizen families now I think this fundamentally helps to illuminate Jason's situation in the Madia it's very easy to sympathize with meda's plight it's less easy to sympathize with Jason but if you're an Athenian man going to watch this display you're watching a man who's in a city where he's got a wife who's not from that City she's not even Greek and he desperately wants to make his way in that City so his foreign wife by whom his sons were actually not going to get any kind of citizenship in Corinth has become a huge embarrassment the second feature which it helps to illuminate is why she does kill the children is it just to spite him no it isn't it's far more than that in killing the children she wipes out his whole citizen household she completely abolishes his ability to perpetuate his own kinship line it's a far more profound offense against him than it it is actually possible for us to imagine it's not just personal hurt it's about his whole kinship line through time and that's partly why she kills off his new wife so that he can't get new heirs by her either if there are women there in the audience it seems to me this is a different experience if you like a more closer to reality experience for the men of the audience than if the women are not there if the women are not there they can explore the nightmare they can experience it fully and then it hasn't happened the women aren't there the women haven't seen it the women have not perhaps gained ideas from it uh because it's quite dangerous isn't it uh it's saying women can get at their husbands in this absolutely fundamental Way by destroying the very thing that they've produced between them and I am inclined to think that it ties in with the notion that women were not present in the audience that a tragedy like media can so fully explore the very worst possibility of family life that the woman destroys the children media is remarkable in that she blurs or confuses a lot of the boundaries that Athenians needed in order to organize their perception of the world category that they needed she is a woman but she actually uses the language very often that would be expected in the mouth of a man from the first moment when she emerges from the house she starts saying things which you'd expect in the mouth of a man rather than a woman most women in Athenian tragedy apologize when they come out they're expected to stay indoors most women say I'm very sorry to have come out please don't sensor me what Madia says is I have come out lest you censor me for being um an introverted private person which is quite extraordinary it immediately signals that this is no ordinary woman and at one very important point in the play she actually uses the male form of the verb to marry she actually says to Jason did I take you to wife and abandon you then sarcastically but the form of the verb for taking to wife that she uses is actually male and this really must have been quite culating theater [Music] the play is really quite odd in formal terms ureides did things which he didn't do in most of his other plays for example he only uses two actors people had been able to use three in tragedy for a long time before and Ides almost always did I think Ides chose to use only two actors for a very specific reason that is that he wanted media to dominate the stage from the moment that she first comes out of the house and take on as it were all her enemies all her male enemies if Ides had complicated the scene with the third important speaking part on stage she'd have erected a triangular situation which would have made that Primal Duality that sort of binary articulation of sex War it would have rendered that thoroughly diluted the second feature that makes it really quite anomalous is that Madia doesn't sing full-blown lyric Aras and heroins in tragedy would very normally be expected to use the lyric sung medium and she doesn't do it at all the third way in which I think it was really most unusual um perhaps most important of all is that media is a tragic Criminal who escapes Scott free she's the only big league criminal in tragedy murderous who gets off unpunished at the end of the [Music] play all this gives us an insight into how ID's audience might have experienced the play but what is it that makes the play so compelling for a modern audience the thing about media that most obviously transports itself immediately into our society where after all divorce and horrible breakups of marriages are are all to every day is the conflict within the family the man who's gone off with what seems to be like a better Prospect a richer younger woman and the way the woman who has been loyal to him who has brought up his children how does she respond that seems to speak immediately to us if I were putting on media now this I would regard as the great challenge how do I relate the later scenes of the play to the earlier scenes of the play in the earlier scenes of the play we seem to be dealing with something we can understand something we can relate to something that is to a a study in how a woman responds to infidelity to disloyalty and then in the later part of the play we seem to have moved into something else um the woman kills her children now that's something we read in the papers every day all all too frequently parents kill their children but when parents kill their children we would think of them in terms of being mentally unbalanced and it's usually part of a pattern of disturbed behavior and it culminates in a suicide and then at the end of the play far from being suicidal far from saying this world is unfit for my kids and unfit for me and I'm out of it far from that she's she's triumphant she's totally triumphant up up there in her Chariot she Revels in her Vengeance on Jason and far from killing herself she's going to go off to Athens Athens the most wonderful City in Greece praised by the chorus earlier in the play where uh everything is so civilized and and so cultivated she's going to enjoy the hospitality of igus as far as this play is concerned it looks as if she's going to go to Athens and live happily ever after the Paradox is happily ever after after doing the things that she's done the aspect of the story which is the most compelling one and makes it the most trans historically exciting and appalling of all the Greek tragedies I believe except for the edus the infanticide is precisely the feature of the Madia that has usually been either played down or written out people want to put on maders but historically they have found it extremely difficult to cope with that particular crime it's actually been felt often to be too shocking for public enactment several versions of the media have actually substituted suicide for infanticide others give her a fit of exculpating Madness it's all right to kill the children provided that she had been sent mad and didn't know what she was doing but it really wasn't until the early days of the 20th century that people could take the Meda straight [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music]