She snookers Jason into believing that she's now cool with his new marriage. Medea begs her husband to ask Glauke if their two sons can stay in Corinth.
Jason is moved and agrees. Medea gives Jason a gossamer gown and a golden crown to sweeten the deal for Glauke. Jason and the children trot off to the palace with hope in their hearts. Their hope is misplaced, however, for once again Medea neglects to mention a vital piece of information: the gifts are cursed. A Messenger returns and tells Medea all about the horror she has wreaked. When the Princess put on the gown and crown, she received a rather nasty surprise.
Her entire body caught fire and the flesh melted from her bones. When Creon saw his daughter's flaming corpse, he was so distraught that he threw his body onto hers and died as well. Medea thinks this is great. Now she only has one thing left to do, in order to leave Jason totally devastated — kill their sons. The murder of her children isn't easy for Medea.
She struggles with her motherly instincts, but in the end her revenge is more important. There is something odd here. Women generally got a raw deal in Ancient Greece, being little more than chattels of their husbands. But even within this context, Medea's actions should take us to the edge of human tolerance and sympathy; without it, her actions are not accessible to human understanding.
The central "sin" committed by Jason is that he divorces Medea to marry someone else. In Ancient Greece this may have denoted a certain brutishness, but in modern Ireland, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women.
Ninety per cent of divorces, regardless of fault, result in the wife getting the family home, custody of the children and an income for life at the husband's expense. In Ancient Greece, the average woman lived until her mids, the average man 10 years more.
In Ireland today, the average woman lives almost to the age of 80, some seven years more than her male counterpart. Ninety per cent of our suicide victims, 80 per cent of our drug addicts, and 90 per cent of people sleeping rough in our streets are men. Ancient Greece this ain't. And yet this play functions with more or less the same mainspring as it did 2, years ago: the notion that women are oppressed by men, without any means of responding.
The trick is effected by presenting a play other than the one Euripides wrote. Not only are there nuanced differences in the script, but there is a set of choices made in the casting and playing, particularly of the male roles, that drives the play in a different way to the original.
Kreon, the king and father of the bride-to-be, is played as a bully, who pushes Medea around before admitting he is afraid of her. Jason, the errant husband, is a muscle-bound himbo whose self-justifications play as pure parody. Fiona Shaw charms the harm out of Medea, winning our sympathy by tickling our funny bones, and concealing the fact that the production functions like a Christmas panto: the men being pompous tyrants and the women free spirits seeking to deflate this pomposity.
Medea is self-absorbed, selfish, a woman without redeeming qualities. She believes she can kill her children because she gave them life. In one scene, the audience is invited to collaborate: she announces how she proposes to trick her husband into assisting her to kill her rival and the children; then Jason swaggers on and enacts his omadaun stereotype, and the audience laughs as he walks into her trap.
Look behind you: your dead babies. But then comes the moment of the calamity, so inevitable and signposted it invites anti-climax. In this production it is relentless in its ferocity and utterly terrifying, an effect achieved mainly with pyrotechnics. The low hum which accompanies proceedings from the beginning rises to a crescendo and the shrieks of the children are underscored in a momentary thunderstorm of white noise and light.
Aegeus' sterility makes him an easy target for the assaults of Medea's cunning. Children and marriage are a constant source of conflict in Medea. The sympathies they inspire cause characters to sever ties to home and family, form strange new allegiances, and even, as we will see in Creon's case, suffer death willingly. At a more abstract level, the play's symbolic structure depends upon Medea's implication in the foundation of Athens. Athens' reputation for being synonymous with high culture and refined civilization, rehearsed by the chorus in its ode, was well-deserved but obviously only a partial truth.
Unjustified cruelty existed there to the same extent as it did everywhere else. The exploitation of women and slaves, addressed in Medea and other Euripidean dramas, was much more severe in Athens than in many surrounding cultures.
An ancient culture's myths, especially those that recounted its origins, served as the primary tool for fostering its self-image. The tales of mythic Athenian kings such as Aegeus, who established rule under the approving eyes of the Olympian gods, became arguments justifying the privileged status of Athenian customs and institutions. The presence of Medea, then, a barbarian sorceress and infamous murderess, at the beginnings of Athenian civilization challenge this simplistic picture of its origins and influence; despite Athens' pretensions towards enlightened greatness, it had already wed itself to primal, unrestrained powers at its very mythical roots.
Freedom and refinement are not the whole story of the culture; a background of murderous intrigue underlies it and testifies to the persistence of injustice into Classical times. The Aegeus scene, while slightly contrived, adds this crucial thematic depth to the play. Medea's speech after Aegeus' departure, her most self-confident to this point, rings with an oddly heroic tone.
Her exuberance previews the complete transformation from despair to poise she will have undergone by play's end. From the beginning of the tragedy, she claims to be acting without respect to human norms, a judgment with which the chorus does not entirely corroborate until she clearly expresses a wish to kill her children at this stage.
At times she attempts to justify their deaths through pragmatic arguments: Creon's family will kill them regardless, better that she accomplish the deed herself than watch them suffer at another's hands. Echoed in later moments, her statement in this speech that she would prefer enduring punishment than humiliation lines seems a more convincing account of her decision.
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