Taking on a production of Luigi Cherubini’s Médée is asking for trouble. Nearly 230 years after its poorly received premiere in Paris, the opera is still being tucked and trimmed to make it more coherent and accessible. The story is one of betrayal, heartbreak and revenge in the form of filicide. What’s to like? Not much. A new production at the National Theatre, sung in its Italian revision, only makes it more confounding.
To his credit, director Roland Schwab hues closely to librettist François-Benoît Hoffman’s retelling of the infamous myth. Instead of a vengeful sorceress, Medea shows up in Corinth as a shabby street person, hoping to win back her estranged husband Jason before he marries King Creon’s daughter Glauce. Spurned, humiliated and banished, Medea is driven to mad acts of retribution, murdering the two children she had with Jason along with his new bride.
Updated with contemporary costumes and split-level staging that puts most of the action on a palatial platform with a cluttered basement underneath, the production initially offers some intriguing psychological possibilities. Jason and Glauce seem headed for marital bliss until Medea crawled out of the basement, like the family’s dirty laundry come to life. But any deeper dimensions are quickly buried under a literal visual motif – piles of black plastic garbage bags that grow in size and number until they swamp the stage. Even the wedding ceremony in the second act is held in what looks like a garbage dump. The effect is lots of dirt underfoot, sans any sense of smoldering tragedy.
Schwab’s strength is in creating striking images with the help of lighting designer Franck Evin: a grief-stricken Jason holding the charred corpse of his new bride in his arms; Medea’s children playing innocently behind her while she contemplates killing them. Unfortunately, those are only moments in what is a muddled narrative. Glauce falls to the ground at the end of the second act, apparently dead after being cursed by Medea, when her murder actually happens in the next act. Her death comes via a poisoned robe and diadem, so how and why is she roasted in the fire that Medea ignites to immolate her children? And why are the children’s bodies hung from the ceiling like they were lynched, with a ham-fisted “your fault” sign?
Among a group of mostly serviceable singers, Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir was the clear standout, embracing the role of Medea’s handmaiden Neris with dramatic flair and shining in an impassioned “Solo un pianto con te versare”, one of the few arias in the opera. Jana Sibera made a persuasive Glauce with a pensive performance in the first act, and Evan LeRoy Johnson had the voice but not the heroic stature to carry the part of Jason. As Medea, Svetlana Aksenova worked hard the entire evening, singing mostly from her knees or prone on the floor. But her singing rarely captured the anguish and fire burning in her character’s heart, invoking pity rather than a sense of overwhelming despair.
The music was equally tepid. Conductor David Švec showed a competent hand but not much verve with the largely Romantic score, which begs for Rossini-style animation and emotional highs and lows. There were individual standouts, in particular the sinuous solo bassoon lines underpinning Medea’s silent deliberations as she contemplates killing her children. Otherwise, it was left to the National Theatre Chorus to inject some electricity into the performance, especially in riveting entreaties to Medea from the distaff side in the first act.
Few operas depend so heavily on a single character, and to be fair, few performers are capable of carrying such a heavy load. Maria Callas resurrected the role of Medea to great acclaim in the 1950s, and in some respects still haunts every revival with an impossibly high bar. Even the Metropolitan Opera waited until 2022 to stage Medea for the first time. Kudos to the National Theatre for having the moxie to take up the challenge, and an “A” for effort. But in execution, it falls far short of its usual commendable work.
