Bloomsbury (2025) 70pp p/b £10.99 (ISBN 9781350523722)
This forms part of the wide-ranging series Methuen Drama Student Editions, now published by Bloomsbury. J. Michael Walton, formerly professor of Drama at Hull, is familiar to classicists for The Greek Sense of Theatre (1984). His more recent Euripides Our Contemporary (2009) deserves to be better known than it is. These and other works over several decades develop an approach to Greek drama pioneered by Oliver Taplin in The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977): the texts are taken seriously as scripts for performance.
W. has an excellent ear and his translation of Medea sparkles: you can hear real people talking as you read. The line numbers remain helpfully close to the Greek, but a disciplined freedom is exercised. Medea is typical of Euripides in beginning with a monologue, and the opening speech of the Nurse gives a flavour of what is to come:
‘If only. If only the good ship Argo
Had never negotiated the misty cliffs,
Never beached at Colchis. If only.
If only no forester had ever chopped the wood,
No carpenter fashioned oars,
For all those fine young men
Whom Pelias sent to find the Golden Fleece.
Then Medea, my mistress, would never have sailed for Iolcos,
Besotted with her Jason.
Never have persuaded those daughters of Pelias
To kill their father. Nor had to flee here,
To Corinth with her man and their children.
Oh, people liked her. Exile was bearable.
And Jason. She did everything for Jason.
The strongest fortress you can find,
A woman and a man in partnership.
Till now.’
The ensuing dialogue with the Tutor is equally lively. Medea’s off-stage lament is rendered laconically (‘No! No! No! / Let me die’) but followed by the transliterated Greek:
iô
dustanos egô melea te ponôn
iô moi moi, pôs an aloiman?
This device is repeated for her subsequent laments, and again much later for the off-stage cries of the children about to be killed: as a marker of high emotion, it could be highly effective in performance.
Medea’s big speech on the lot of women is handled with sarcastic vigour:
‘If you do strike lucky
And this husband turns out bearable,
Submits gracefully, then fine. Congratulations.
If not, you might as well be dead.
When a man starts to get bored at home
He can visit a friend, some kindred spirit,
Look for consolation elsewhere.
We have a single focus, him.
You’ve a nice, easy life, that’s what they say,
Safe at home when they’re off fighting.
Good thinking, that, isn’t it?
I’d fight three wars rather than give birth once.’
Her encounters with a succession of male characters (Creon, Jason, Aegeus) show her scarily impressive, a second Clytemnestra. When she appears triumphantly ex machina at the end, Jason is satisfyingly frenzied:
‘You plague. You hateful thing. You woman
Detested by god, by me, by every mortal man.
You dared to draw a sword and plunge it
Into children, your children, my children …
What a wife you turned out to be.
An animal, not a woman,
A savage, some prehistoric monster.’
The Introduction by Will Shüler (who lectures in Drama at Royal Holloway) is a game of two halves. A survey of the original performance context gives a broadly fair overview, but with many inaccuracies and dubious statements. The capacity of the Theatre of Dionysus is greatly over-estimated. We know too little about the tetralogy of which Medea formed part even to speculate that it represented ‘a move from winter … into spring’. Fertility rituals are ‘symbolic of the virility of the earth’, usually envisaged as feminine. The ‘philosophies of Protagoras’ (cited as evidence for the idea of theatre as didactic) reads oddly when even one is known only from fragments. The claim that in Aristophanes’ Clouds ‘the Sophistry of the famous philosopher Socrates is treated as a kind of witchcraft’ is dubious on several counts. Mention of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War is immediately followed by ‘Pericles, the Archon (ruler) of Athens since 461 BCE, was the general charged with leading this battle’, again with several misunderstandings. Naturally a non-specialist cannot be expected to have all this material at their fingertips, but the account should have been run past someone who could have corrected it.
S. comes into his own in the second half, with stimulating summaries of contemporary productions, adaptations and appropriations (interestingly differentiated) in different media and different parts of the world: if there is a recurrent theme, it is that patriarchal oppression can be a metaphor for other sorts.
The notes in the back are skeletal (just forty on the whole play) but mostly sound and informative. Proofreading has been done to a good standard.
John Taylor