Theatre •
Medea (Olivier) Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Queen's)
Ritual and bravura
Christopher Edwards
No apologies for returning to the National Theatre's International Season, where Yukio Ninagawa's Medea played (for far too few performances) to packed houses. As he showed with his Macbeth (reviewed last week), visual flair and a sure grip on the dramatic heart of the play are his two great virtues. What he succeeds so well in creating are the necessary condi- tions — those of coherent, intense stylisa- tion — for the release of powerful emo- tion. His Medea displayed just this approach, but the invention was, if any- thing, higher than in Macbeth. On this occasion it was married to an even greater sensual delight in realising the formal, ritualised patterns of Euripides's tragedy.
Remembering that his flamboyant theat- ricality does actually serve the drama, here are some of the more memorable effects. After the early speeches of the Nurse, the stage was criss-crossed by four bands of sharp, white light. Enter, along those bands, the 16-strong Chorus (male, like the rest of the cast), strumming in agitation on their lute-like shamisen instruments. This Japanese director is undoubtedly a master choreographer of large groups — it would be interesting to see him handle Julius Caesar. Throughout his Medea, the mar- shalling of the Chorus lent great weight to Medea's awful progression towards the murder of her rival and of her own children. Part of the vividness of the drama lies, precisely, in her shifts between deci- sion and doubt — Euripides, alone of the classical triumvirate, understood, in dramatic terms, the psychology of indeci- sion. And it was the Chorus who, as it were, projected her mental states on stage.
They gave us phalanxed advances, im- ploring prostration and terrified little hud- dles. Their blue-black gowns were flicked over their shoulders in unison to reveal, startlingly and suggestively, pink insides. At the moment when Medea resolved to carry out her plan, she plunged her sword into a stone. Then, in an uninhibited piece of bravura invention, the entire Chorus mimicked Medea as she disgorged a blood- red silk streamer from (it seemed) the back of her throat. With Medea as an axis, the Chorus revolved around her, their lb silk streamers spewing forth.
It is not quite Busby Berkeley, but with Ninagawa we are often aware of an ele- ment of self-conscious theatricality. Occa- sionally, it might be said, his stated inten- tion of combining traditional Japanese theatre with elements of Western culture seems a touch appliqué. In fact I can only think of one such instance in Medea. At the start, an odd, folksy guitar ballad — some mythic revival from the Attic Top Ten punctuated the rhythmic banging of a gong. Against this lapse, however, Ninaga- wa's use of a passage from Handel was brilliantly effective as a means of under- scoring Medea's passionate intent. So too was the sequence of ritual disrobing that he gave Medea — discarding her fantastical silk witch's garb in two stages, until she was down to a close-fitting crimson gown. And Euripides himself — who loved visual sensation and climactic events — would surely have approved Medea's escape at the close, drawn aloft by a pair of Japanese dragons.
If there are doubts about Ninagawa's theatre, they lie solely in a sense of apprehension about whether he will start merely repeating himself. One might con- sider Macaulay's interesting insight made in another context: The sure sign of the general decline of an art is the frequent occurence, not of deformity, but of mis- placed beauty.' On the remarkable evi- dence of his two productions in this season, Ninagawa's beauty has been perfectly placed. He has also helped us see two great Western classics with fresh eyes.
Jeffrey Archer's sentimental court-room puzzler certainly qualifies for the category nostagically described by Kenneth Tynan as the lost art of bad drama. Beyond Reasonable Doubt is a load of old, tear- jerking tosh, held together by dollops of Dylan Thomas. But many well-known hankies have been raised to the eye in salute, including, I can reveal, that of a soi-disant hard man who owns a certain pub in Soho. To no one's great surprise, the irrepressible Jeffrey Archer has written a bad successful play.
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