Reading the Medea

Extract

The Medea—in a Japanese version—performed outdoors—after dusk—in the neo-Classical courtyard of the Old College Edinburgh—late in what had been a cold and wet August: was it worth buying a ticket for that—even if Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth had been the sensation of the 1985 Festival? After all, that had been indoors, and the Shakespeare play had been part of my mind for over forty years. You had to choose between Greek and German, in my day, at a Scottish grammar school, and I had opted for German (entirely because I feared the principal Classics master). But then—I understand Japanese as little as I can follow spoken Greek, and would not that be the case for nearly everyone in the audience? We should all be relying on the eloquence of gesture, lighting, tone, and perhaps music. It seemed advisable, for all that, to study the text in advance of the performance. What follows is an attempt to capture my reading of the Medea. For the first time in my life I found myself gripped by the greatness of the play. I used, and am quoting, Philip Vellacott’s translation for Penguin Classics, and my interpretation is wholly dependent on a marvellous essay by Bernard Knox.