Medea | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
Medea proved that live performance can be streamed as a visceral theatrical experience, and opens a world of possibilities.
Adelaide Festival
Don't miss out on the headlines from Adelaide Festival. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Medea
Theatre / Netherlands
FESTIVAL
Her Majesty’s Theatre
March 4
The grand experiment paid dividends in spades. Live streamed from the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Australian director Simon Stone’s adaptation of Medea felt absolutely instantaneous, completely palpable and devastatingly real.
From the moment the production began, the massive stark white set by Australian Robert Cousins – a former State Theatre designer and Advertiser artist – looked so three-dimensional on screen that it seemed as if you could stretch your arm into it.
There were moments when the slightest motion of the cameras – seen on their tracks in Zoom prelude to the performance – was almost dizzying.
That depth of field also plays heavily into Stone’s direction, as the actors are dotted about the vast emptiness to create various tableaus with an almost photographic focus.
At times, we were watching a screen on a stage, being streamed on another screen on a different stage halfway around the world. Yet the experience was so vivid and immersive that most probably forgot to even notice.
There was just one, momentary skip early on as a slight lag between sound and vision was resynced.
Stone has masterfully updated Euripides’ tragedy with the true story of a US doctor who killed her own children in a 1995 house fire.
Marieke Heebink gives an astonishing, heart-rending performance as the doctor, Anna, released from psychiatric care and desperate to connive her way back into the lives of her ex-husband and children.
Heekbink mesmerises the audience and has its empathy in the palm of her hand.
As Lucas the husband, Aus Greidanus Jr balances genuine concern for his former wife’s wellbeing, while wanting to further his own ambition and forge a life with his new girlfriend Clara (Eva Heijnen).
Sonny van Utteren and Titus Theunissen are an energetic joy to behold as the children, making a family video documentary which triggers the final tragedy.
The company is familiar to Festival audiences from its Shakespeare trilogies Roman Tragedies and Kings of War, and Medea was similarly performed in Dutch with subtitles.
However, the final scene – in which the white floor and actors ended up covered in fake blood, falling ash and red syrup – more strongly recalled last year’s Mozart Requiem by Italian director Romeo Castellucci.
This innovation proved that live performance can be streamed as a visceral theatrical experience, and opens a world of possibilities for the near future.
Bars, stars and festival guitars
Wanderers frontman Dusty Lee Stephensen will premiere his upcoming solo material as part of Adelaide Guitar Festival.
Festivals in the firing line amid looming city rate rise
A raft of much-loved city festivals, activations and business programs may face devastating or program-ending funding cuts as Adelaide City Council looks to lower its rates.