by Rachel Cusk
Medea was a prophetess.
In fact she willfully got redress
by understanding a moral confusion
and following it to its logical conclusion.
Quite clubbable, we gods find her:
the hard truth isn’t something you have to remind her
of. She looked at her predicament
with eyes quite free of sentiment.
That’s not a quality you humans tend to display.
It’s why we’re in charge, vous comprenez?
You confuse facts with feelings for the sake of convenience.
You condemn what’s right; to what’s wrong you show lenience.
Still, so much misfortune would derange
any man; and Jason turned strange,
for man he is, human not devil.
His ex-wife’s revel
of revenge laid him low.
His work dried up; with two children in tow,
penniless now, and with a ruined wife,
he despaired of what would become of his life.
He turned thin and silent; he went out at night,
running, black-clad, avoiding the light.
A swift-footed wraithe, broken and poor,
with the tabloid press camped at his door.
He couldn’t get what he wanted.
For want he was haunted and hunted.
It was wicked, what she wrote; says moi, anyway.
Happiness is a shadow that quickly fleets away
when you look at it too hard.
If she loved her husband so much,
why cause him such pain? Are any of us that important?
And so, the last chapter of this farce:
the husband finds himself out on his arse.
His plans and ambitions all wrecked.
His fatal vanity checked.
Darkness is coming for him, black and true.
Call it justice or call it evil, up to you.
SCENE 19
The stage is bare. MEDEA stands on one side and JASON on the other. Both are holding their phones. The desk with photographs of the BOYS in silver frames stands between them. JASON dials and MEDEA’s phone rings. She answers it.
MEDEA
I’m in the middle of something. I don’t have –
JASON
You need to come.
MEDEA
– time to talk. I’ll call –
JASON
You need to come right now.
MEDEA
– another time. I’m in the middle –
JASON (Shouting.)
Well fucking stop!
MEDEA
– of something.
JASON weeps down the phone. MEDEA is silent.
JASON
Relentless.
MEDEA
What?
JASON
You are. I never knew.
Weeps again.
I never knew what you were.
Pause.
MEDEA
I was more than you deserved.
Pause.
JASON
The boys have really –
MEDEA
And I’ll see –
JASON
done it. They’ve really –
MEDEA
you dead.
JASON
done it this time.
MEDEA
I’ll see you –
JASON
Can you shut up?
MEDEA
– dead. I’ll see –
JASON
Can you fucking shut up?
MEDEA
– you dead.
JASON (Shouting.)
Can you fucking shut up and listen!
Pause. He weeps.
I’m at the hospital. Do you hear me? I’m at the hospital.
They killed the dog. Are you listening? They killed the fucking
dog. They kicked her to death like a pair of fucking delinquents.
Then they locked themselves in their room and ate a bottle of
painkillers between them. You did this to them. This is your fault.
Can you fucking hear me? They ate a bottle of painkillers.
They fed them to each other like fucking Smarties.
Pause.
Do you even care if they’re alive?
Pause.
Do you?
Pause.
Do you? Jesus, do you? Don’t you want to know?
Pause.
Don’t you?
Pause.
Don’t you fucking want to know?
The CLEANER enters and starts mopping around the couple and the desk.
CLEANER
My mother say man can never be your friend. She say, if my husband my friend today, tomorrow maybe he my enemy. Then where I be? She say, better have woman as friend. But I don’t want. Two woman friend like two slave friend. Friendship strong maybe, but both people weak. Like sandwich with nothing inside.
She stops mopping and straightens up.
Tomorrow I leaving this place.
Pause.
I like to go to the beach. I want feel the sun on my face, like when I was young girl. I just lie there my eyes close and feel the sun. Think nothing. Think nothing cept how good it feel, live in my body.
She starts to mop again around the desk and knocks it by mistake. The two photographs fall to the floor and smash.
End.
At the Almeida, we strive to create theatre that asks questions of its audiences, of who they are and the world they live in. We believe that the work we present must be alive and resonant, as far away as possible from being dusty cultural heritage.
So when we came to the writers of Ancient Greece, the founding fathers of theatre as we know it, we wanted to be true to their plays – staging them in full complexity, presenting their formal iconoclasm, their humour, musicality, politics, violence and unswerving drama.
These writers took society’s old myths and made them new: changed them, exploded them, set them loose as contemporary stories that spoke to their city. At the same time, they posed big, provocative, sometimes uncomfortable questions; ones which, two thousand years later, we still struggle to answer.
We want to follow their example. We are taking the Greeks out of the Attic.
Medea is the third of three major new productions of Greek tragedy roaring into our theatre from May to October 2015. Alongside these, inspired in form and spirit by the Greek Dionysia, we will also present a festival of other work in the theatre and off-site, including responses, talks, readings and panels. We hope you can join us.
Rupert Goold, Artistic Director
