Sarah Kane meets The Burnt City in this brutal and cheeky retelling of Jason and Medea’s relationship.
Lost Dog’s seasonal revival of its twist on the classics should come with a trigger warning for the unhappily divorced, as there is less Christmas cheer here and more acerbic wit.
Beautifully integrated into the back wall of the Linbury and a fire escape up into the more golden world of Cinderella, Ruination’s chief narrator, Hades, played by Jean Daniel Broussé, begins his camp incineration of the characters’ motives by questioning the audience’s taste in theatre and sucking the finger of a body on his surgical table. This nonchalant barbing would easily fit into one of Sarah Kane’s modern retellings.
Soon, a small cast of characters populating Greek Myth are ‘processed’ into Hades’ basement via funny plays on bureaucracy and a prison ‘contact’ centre. Here we are in the territory of comedy for comedy’s sake, as Jason’s attempts to speak to Hades are thwarted by the loop of a recorded message wrongly predicting his responses.
The frustrations of new arrivals, Jason and Medea, are quickly rushed into a performative courtroom situation, where Persephone and Hades represent Medea and Jason with competitive spirit. This allows some smooth trips down memory lane with dance and movement sequences animating events—Medea’s struggle to cross the river to reach her children being a genuinely moving moment of physical theatre, and Jason’s seduction of both Medea and the daughter of King Aeetes demonstrating a memorable sort of physical banter.
As the embittered couple battle it out, the thread of ‘unreliable narration’ is intermittently sewn, suggesting that Medea did not in fact murder her children but was the victim of Jason’s instructions to a bloodthirsty mob before he maligned her reputation. This feminist revision is nothing new, but succeeds in providing a surprising and emotive reveal as the case reaches conclusion.
There is satisfaction in seeing elements of forum theatre, more popular in the political, physical plays of the sixties and seventies, given an airing with an auditorium and tragicomic props. Jason, played by Liam Francis, gives a well-judged performance with natural comic timing and Hannah Shepherd’s Medea is a surprisingly sympathetic and relatable portrayal. Anna-Kay Gayle is a statuesque symbol of strength as Persephone, and credit goes to the musical ensemble members stealing the audience during their entrances as the lost and uninitiated.
When the verdict is in and Sheree Dubois sings a bluesy elegy for brutalised love, many a tear has been jerked. This slick show, pulling out some of the more entertaining tools from the toolbox of theatrical devices, is sure to be a well-placed arrow in the heart for most adults with a caustic sense of humour. Although it does come with a trigger warning to those in the hinterlands of a break-up.
Reviewer: Tamsin Flower