An archive of blog entries about plays and theatre production.
What have you been watching? Including Medea (Almeida), The Beautiful Lie, The Player, Y Gwyll and Limitless
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
With no Cumberemergency to take me away from it all this week, here’s WHYBW, right on schedule. This week, I’ve already reviewed the first episode of ABC’s rather bad (in all senses of the word) Wicked City, and passed a third-episode verdict on The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; of course, Supergirl began this week on CBS and Sky1, but I previewed that a while ago. That means that after the jump, you can enjoy my thoughts on the latest episodes of 800 Words, Arrow, The Beautiful Lie, Blindspot, The Flash, Limitless, The Player, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst.
But I’ve also been to the theatre again! Proper theatre, too – none of that ‘theatre at the movies’ rubbish, neither.
Medea (Almeida, until November 14)
Remember Clueless and how everyone was impressed at how Amy Heckerling had taken Jane Austen’s Emma and modernised it for American teenagers? Remember how it wasn’t called Emma?
That’s probably Medea‘s biggest failing. Had it been called Northern London Writer Is Getting A Divorce From Her Actor Husband Jason and the Kids Are Being Dragged Into It, people would probably have been raving about it being a great modern feminist play, with marvellous parallels to the Euripidean Medea.
However, if you call something Medea, there’s a certain expectation that there should be a certain amount of dialogue, plot, characters, etc from the original. Whereas this Medea has virtually no lines, few characters, few themes and few plot elements in common with the original. Which is probably why no one’s been raving about it.
On its own terms, it’s not bad. In terms of staging, it’s a sort of halfway house between the Almeida’s almost traditional Bakkhai and its archly inventive Oresteia, sometimes a little too pretentious for its own good to the point of laughability, but usually taking good decisions about how to depict events. Kate Fleetwood is as good as Helen McCrory was at the National last year, but less ‘actorly’ about it. The feminism isn’t so much sub-text as both text and super-text, with endless debates about the place of women in society, women’s value, men, fathers et al. The changes made by Rachel Cusk feel almost autobiographical – even if they aren’t, you’ll still feel they are by the end of it.
The worst aspect of the play is that it has the somewhat clumsy move of having a god/goddess explain the feminism of it all to the audience at the end. It also feels, given how much plot innovations Cusk has added to the text, like she’s realised she’s run out of time, as virtually everything that gets set up by her ends up explained concluded hurriedly at the end by this god/goddess. You could potentially argue that it’s a traditional move for a Greek tragedy, to have a god explain the plot, but it sits poorly in such an otherwise modern play.
It’s intermittently interesting and clever, with a lot to say for itself, even if it could say a lot of it with considerably more subtlety and maybe better pacing, too. But whatever you do, don’t go in thinking you’re going to see something that’s anything like what Euripides wrote.
