'She's chucked out like an old coat that nae langer fits him...'
Medea and Jason, clinging together as refugees in Corinth, have struggled to bring up their beloved offspring in this alien and unsympathetic society. Now Jason has a plan to better integrate himself. Unfortunately, this involves abandoning his wife, the mother of his children...
Spurned, destitute, desperate, Medea exacts her terrible retribution.
Liz Lochhead's Scots-inflected version of Euripides' classic revenge tragedy was first performed by Theatre Babel in 2000 and won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. It was revived by the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival, with Adura Onashile as Medea, directed by Michael Boyd.
Euripides (c. 480-406 BC) was, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens. Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her original stage plays include Thon Man Moliere, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Moliere's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'Ecole des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone). Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Title: Medea (NHB Classic Plays)
Author: Liz Lochhead,Euripides
ISBN: 9781839041150
Binding:
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Publication Date: 2022-08-18
Number of Pages: 64
Weight: 0.0800 kg
'This outstanding work should firmly establish the Glasgow playwright as Scotland's greatest living dramatist... the finest piece I have seen on the Scottish stage this year'
* Scotland on Sunday *
'Liz Lochhead's stunning new version of Medea is the kind of interpretation - brave, visionary, risky - that blows a well-known text apart and reassembles it in a completely new light... ancient but new, cosmic yet agonisingly familiar'
* Scotsman *
'Some of the most exciting recent work on Greek drama in the English language'
* Sunday Times *
'Liz Lochhead's celebrated adaptation... a formidable, immersive experience'
* The Times *
'Awesome... Liz Lochhead's Scots verse spits wit and venom as male power meets female determination with operatic intensity'
* Guardian *
'Magnificent, thrilling... Lochhead's brilliant and scathing Scots-language version of Euripides' mighty text [has] a simmering and terrifying eloquence'
* Scotsman *
'A breathtaking interpretation of the Greek tragedy... the addition of snarling Scottish dialect works brilliantly, adding extra layers of menace and seduction to the shocking tragedy... Transfixing, bloody, and reeking of danger, with images that will linger in your mind for hours after ending'
* Time Out *
'Raw and brutal... Liz Lochhead's version seeks, like all good contemporary productions of Greek theatre, to trace how its universality can speak to us today'
* WhatsOnStage *
'Terrific... The beauty of Lochhead's version is not just its dark sardonic humour, but also in the way it is entirely female-centred... Medea [is] far more than a woman spurned. She's a woman caught in a patriarchal society where women are devalued by men, considered fair game and judged by other women if they do not conform. She makes her decisions with that in mind - with a terrible clarity. Lochhead and Onashile make us understand those choices. Then they make us weep'
* The Stage *
'Liz Lochhead's razor-sharp adaptation of Euripides' Medea is forged in fire... still searingly relevant and painfully urgent'
* Broadway World *
