Medea: Kirtana Kumar is an indomitable rebel in Rebecca Spurgeon’s retelling of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy
Echoing the world’s current torments, Rebecca Spurgeon-directed solo act, featuring Kirtana Kumar, is taking the stage on October 25 as part of the 2024 Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival
By Reema Gowalla
It’s nothing less than astonishing that a play first performed in 431 BC echoes so much of the world’s current torments. Euripides’ Greek tragedy Medea is said to be based on a myth, but the act’s devastating relevance in the present time cannot be stressed enough. One of the most performed plays in Greece, the plot of Medea revolves around the horrific act of filicide. It is the ‘story of a woman so fearful of her impending exile and statelessness that she chooses to destroy her own children’. Cut to 2024, acclaimed actor Kirtana Kumar has reprised her role as Medea in noted director Rebecca Spurgeon’s haunting retelling of the ancient piece. After premiering earlier this year, the solo performance is ready for its next show as part of the ongoing Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival on October 25.
Often termed a gut-wrenching tragedy, Medea’s plight ‘reflects the experiences of countless women whose lives have been ravaged by war, displacement and the desperation to find safety and home for themselves and their children’. Presented by Jagriti Theatre, Ananth Menon has done the sound design for the 70-minute play, while the other members of the crew include Anshu Arora (costume design) and Arghya Lahiri (light design).
Ahead of the show, Rebecca (R) and Kirtana (K) spoke with TheatreRoom about the making of Medea, its intensity and significance in the present world. Excerpts from the exclusive conversations:
Q. What influenced you to reinterpret Medea on stage? Why do you think the play is relevant in the present time?
R: I think I’ve always been interested in the idea of how we define borders. Entirely manmade, they have become structures of identity and resource in the world. Even while growing up, I have always thought how borders come up? Did someone draw a line? Also, what happens if you cross that line? How are wars fought across these borders? I think in human history, the idea of the border has been everlasting. So, when I looked at Medea, this thought of the border, of being a refugee and a landless woman who finds herself without a home sort of came back to me. When I was in rehearsal with Kirtana, we spoke a lot about what it means to reimagine Medea today. That’s when we realised that we are telling the same story of the vulnerable and stateless woman, because there are many Medeas in the world today, who are displaced and rendered landeless amid the ongoing wars and refugee crisis. There’s just so much resonance with the world that we’ve seen around us and with the story of Medea. The thing that people remember the most about her is that she’s a woman who went crazy after being abandoned by her husband, and ended up killing her two children.
While thinking about that aspect of Medea, we forget the world that she came from. That’s also one of the reasons I didn’t want to change the text. Every line that Medea speaks is exactly how Euripides wrote it. This piece is an original translation, and not adapted. When you hear these lines, you’ll be surprised to see how a script, which was written thousands of years ago, is so relevant in today’s world. When our play opened in February this year, the Russia-Ukraine war was already going on and the Israel-Gaza war had also begun. Everything that I made as part of the set are actually just images that you would see if you just Googled the aftermath of war and displacement. That has informed the design choice for this piece, because that is the world in which we continue to find Medea.
Q. Medea is an evocative yet disturbing piece. How difficult was it for you to perform this on stage?
K: Physically, it’s an extremely exhausting performance. I’ve had to prepare for a long time to be up to the task of responding to the text, because you have to be well-prepared for it both vocally and physically. That said, as artists we also strive to be cognizant of the present moment. So, I feel compelled to tell this story. It is the story of a migrant woman, which is a familiar subject to most of us. It’s also a story of a woman who feels unseen without a state. Nobody is there to witness her story. Now that again, is familiar to all of us. We know what this does to human beings. We also know that the stories of women are very rarely told, especially because it’s easy to dismiss them for being ‘mad’, ‘crazy’, ‘evil’ or just something.
But imagine the journey of this person who has no existence without a state, who’s not represented and is neither seen or heard. What’s happening to her is multipronged, because on one level, she’s being discarded. The man whom she loved is rejecting her and taking a younger and more appealing woman, who is more suitable to his ambitions. Then, there’s the practical thing. Without a state, who is she? What is a woman without any land to call her own? She’s someone without citizenship.
It’s something that greatly interests me. I feel compelled to share the story. Was it difficult for me to perform this piece? My answer to that is: physically, yes, you really have to really prepare for it. But after that, it’s a complete joy to perform this piece. It’s a tragedy by Euripides, which has been beautifully translated.
Q. You have performed Dario Fo’s Medea in the past. Did you feel any contrast in your response to the piece this time?
K: I first performed Medea (Dario Fo’s short play) about 25 years ago, when I was in my mid-30s. My approach to it was completely different then. The tone of the text was also a bit different. When I return to it now, at 58, it’s a different body that’s telling the story. So, I feel it a lot more. In my 30s, it was more of an angry young woman performing. But now, it’s a defeated woman. Now, it’s a woman who is trying to retain some dignity and humanity. Earlier, it was somebody who’s enraged at being discarded. As an older woman performing it, it’s very resonant. With any role, you have to dig inside yourself and see your vulnerabilities. You have to do that with any role, more so with Medea. But for me, that is the gift of being an actor, that I allow myself to go into those places.
Q. Tell us about your experience of working with Rebecca?
K: Rebecca is a really finely-tuned director. She’s very deft and really holds space for me as an actor. She makes it possible for me to experiment and try multiple approaches and be willing to fail. She’s so open to all of it. Rebecca also prepares very well. Her research is infallible. She’s literary-minded, so she reads multiple texts in order to help the actor with the character.
As a person, she’s very grounded and knows how to give me directions on stage. I’m a director, too, so I really appreciate that. She knows how to nudge it in the other direction when something’s not working. I feel very grateful for this journey and I’ve really loved it. So, when people ask me after the show, ‘Are you feeling battered?’ My answer to that is: ‘no’. On the contrary, it’s a joy for an actor to be given this opportunity, and I really value it.
Q. Tell us about the work that went into making the piece..
R: Medea is right there on stage. She will tell her story and go back to the position where she started from, until we come back and listen to her story. I think the bigger question we’re trying to ask with this piece is that at which point do we allow the story to be put to rest? And what would that take? I spent several months doing research on conflict and forced displacement, by reading and looking at images, because it’s not part of my reality. But it’s a part of the reality that is around us and I think we need to acknowledge that. In terms of the play’s technical aspects, the sound design and soundscape kind of replicate the refugee crisis that happens around the world.
As an audience sitting in the safety of a theatre, if we find the wailing and sounds of helicopters and bombs going off discomforting or even depressive, imagine the plight of those experiencing this in real life for months and years on end. So, before we talk about the ‘terrible’ act of a mother killing her own children, it’s important to understand the context and ask what drove her to such an act of violence. Here, I’m reminded of Warsan Shire’s poem, Home, which says: ‘no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land’.
While reviving the original piece, it was also important to see how I could deconstruct and remove the power from the male characters of the play. In Euripides’ Medea, Jason and Creon banish her and become the voice that controls the narrative. So in this production, I also looked at ways in which we can remove some of that power and place it back in Medea’s hand. There’s no other masculine presence on stage in our play. I wanted to find as many ways as possible to give her back her agency. So, the Medea story is constantly interrupted by this contemporary idea of a refugee and the displaced.
Q. Kirtana is an acclaimed stage and screen actor and director. How was it collaborating with her on this piece?
R: Working with Kirtana has been absolutely magical. She came to this piece as an informed artist. She’s a thinking actor, whose own work is very introspective. We’re a very small production. It’s just Kirtana, Ananth and myself in the rehearsal room. But it’s a room of great safety.
Catch the upcoming show of Medea at Ranga Shankara on October 25 (7.30pm). You can book your tickets here.
