Word: medea
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When the actress Dame Judith Anderson (Rebecca) took Robinson Jeffers' adaptation of Euripides' Medea on tour in 1947, the company included Bit Player Zoe Caldwell. In a theatrical reunion, Dame Judith, 84, Robert Whitehead, who produced the original version, and Caldwell (now Mrs. Whitehead) are restaging the updated treatment of the classic Greek drama at Washington's Kennedy Center. This time round, Caldwell takes on the taxing title role, and Dame Judith, retired from the stage for the past decade, plays the role of the nurse. Dame Judith was jumpy about returning to the boards. Says...
...Inferno, Dante's Deity was satanically inventive in making the vengeance fit the crime. The best tragic theater (Hamlet, for example) and some of the worst has been built around the deep urge to settle someone's hash. In an orgy of horrific finality and emotional overstatement, Medea murders her two sons and hurls their corpses at Jason. That, God knows, ought to teach...
Mercouri plays a fading film star who returns to her native Greece to appear in Medea and also in a TV film about her preparation for the role. As a publicity stunt she arranges to visit, in jail, an American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who, like Medea, has committed infanticide. What with a demanding rehearsal schedule and the raging and pouting she inflicts on her director and her entourage, you would think the Mercouri character would have no time left to feel guilty about exploiting the half-mad murderess, but she does. Repeatedly she goes back into the prison...
...nothing very vital is added to anyone's understanding of that classic figure, and Mercouri's performance in long scenes from Medea doesn't help much either. There is much eye rolling, teeth baring and anguished screeching, but no break in the clouds of self-absorption that always hover around her. Finally, the modern Medea's story gets told, the play opens, and the picture ends, leaving the audience no wiser...
...Gardner's organization is baffling, at least his style is endearing. The sense of mythic wonder that fills his books Grendel and Jason and Medea is present here in the form of vignettes and metaphors; and even when he rattles on about the good and the true, Gardner never pontificates, never becomes self-righteous. Even when what he says sounds like it would suit a preacher among the unbaptized, his manner remains that of the elderly raconteur, sitting by the fire with a mug of ale and a pipe...