Medea
Composed by Gordon Kerry
Libretto by Justin MacDonnell (adapted from Seneca)
Arias
Written and composed by Caroline Wilkins
Together at the Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, until May 16
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
The promotional material for Medea was promising. "While classical opera is littered with the corpses of tragic heroines", it said, "Medea stands over two thousand years against the literary archetype of female passivity and heroic self-destruction".
In Greek mythology, Jason gets Medea to betray her people (the Colchians) so that he can steal the famed Golden Fleece. She has to use her powers of witchcraft to help Jason get away and even has to kill her brother in the process. Then Jason decides to dump Medea and marry Creusa (the princess of Corinth) to get Corinthian citizenship. In the deal Medea is to be banished.
Understandably she is not very happy, and when Medea gets into a rage she threatens to outdo almost any character a modern soap opera can throw up — she kills her lover Jason's intended bride and father-in-law and even her own two children, fathered by Jason.
The Medea presented by Chamber Made Opera (and apparently faithfully adapted from first century AD politician, lawyer, philosopher and writer Lucius Anaeus Seneca) is another archetype — the woman lost to uncontrolled emotion. It is her passionate desire for Jason that drives her to bloody revenge.
Seneca, a Stoic, saw Medea as a symbol for the socially destructive effects of unfettered emotions. But Chamber Made Opera offers us another angle on Medea, drawing on the fact that Seneca lived in Caligula's time and the beginning of the end of the Roman empire. (Seneca was banished from Rome for having an affair with Caligula's sister and later ordered to commit suicide by Nero, which he did.) Medea can also be seen as archetypical object of Roman xenophobia, suggests librettist MacDonnell.
The music, the use of Latin and English, and costume (Medea is in exotic, multicoloured garb while Jason and Corinthian King Creon are in grey suits) are meant to underline Medea's "foreignness". But the use of language (the Corinthian wedding hymns are in Latin) tends to confuse this point for an English-speaking audience, understating Chamber Made's explanation of the Medea myth. To make matters worst, it is hard to understand what Medea is singing most of the time, which undermines any sympathy the audience might feel for her despite the violence of her revenge.
Arias is a puzzling piece. It entertains by finding comedy in clever musical manipulations of the aria, an operatic piece for a single voice. There is no story to this. A baritone, mezzo and tenor play musical games trying to replicate a number of operatic recordings played on an antique 78 rpm record — while making funny faces. but they went on a bit.
Chamber Made Opera has been hailed by critics as one of Australia's most adventurous, audacious and contemporary opera companies. In its previous productions, like The Cars That Ate Paris and Lacuna, it has sought to bring opera into the 20th century. This latest offering presents opera in a musically accessible form, but audiences may be left asking themselves if these performances said much to them.