Medea: SexWar

Reviews

The Sunday Times, 18 August 1991
Volcanic eruptions in the battle of the sexes

The pleasures of the flesh are back in fashion, reports Trevor Johnston.

Following the successful adaptation of Tony Harrison's poem V last year, Swansea-based Volcano Theatre has stuck to the formula with this typically energetic reworking of his earlier Medea: Sex War.

As Theatre Workshop pulsates to the electronic throb of acid house music, the quest of Jason and the Argonauts, in which Jason is aided by the sorceress Medea, is rewarded, not with the traditional golden fleece, but with a shiny new Jean-Paul Gaultier jacket.

This is not an indictment of 1990s fashion madness. The company targets the preening vanity and emotional insensitivity of the male of the species right back to the very cradle of civilisation.

With the author's permission, Harrison's gloss on Euripides has been intercut with Valerie Solanis's SCUM - Society for Cutting Up Men - Manifesto, from the Warhol scene in 1960s New York.

Volcano's boldly confrontational manner seeks to create meaning through word and almost constant movement.

As the lycra and leather-clad cast of four go through their pulse-racing paces, the pattern of domination, submission and violent collision becomes almost diagrammatically obvious through the changing spatial relationships between the actors, clambering around, up and over the simple chromium climbing frame set. Their physical commitment is beyond reproach.

The central theme easily lends itself to such animated exposition, but it is to the credit of Janek Alexander, the director, and Nigel Charnock, the movement co-ordinator, that the grouping and re-grouping maintains a coherent flow without breaking down into a series of slam-bang action set pieces.

For all the sweat, shouting and slap of flesh on flesh this is impressively, carefully modulated stuff.

Trevor Johnston


Scotland on Sunday

In the maelstrom of emotional activity on the Fringe, two features, as it were, stand out. Nudity is passé, the rubbing of erogenous zones is in. The fondling of one's privates before an audience is something which must, as Madonna has demonstrated, be done with confidence. Any hint of self-consciousness has the audience squirming, not with pleasure, but with embarrassment.

Handling their parts to perfection were Volcano Theatre in Medea: SexWar. Dark and powerful, taut with sexual energy, this is immensely physical, radical and exciting theatre. By turns wild, beautiful, crude, violent and tender, it combines Tony Harrison's reworking of Jason and the Argonauts and Medea with Valerie (I shot Andy Warhol) Solanis's SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto. The golden fleece is a gold lamé bomber jacket, the Argonauts strut in black leather, lathered in sweat, Medea writhes with fury and passion. Amazing, skilful, abandoned things are done on the simple scaffold set, until to laugh is relief. All members perform superbly - and the rest of them is as good.


The Guardian
Medea: SexWar

Oddly enough, on the night Prince Edward was in Manchester for a gala production of Euripides' Medea, directed by Phyllida Lloyd at the Royal Exchange, another company was visiting the Manchester Green Room with its own, very different staging of the same play.

Volcano Theatre from Swansea, who toured Tony Harrison's epic poem V last year, have taken his operatic version of the text of Medea and intercut passages from Valerie Solanis's 1967 Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto.

The Royal Exchange production is very visual, physical theatre with a multiracial cast using African music and movement to extend the Greek tragedy into a mythic world and give Medea's killing of her own chlidren a feminist element of divine destiny.

Volcano's version is even more physical, more like a sung wrestling match between the sexes. They fling each other around a set which is nothing more than a box of Trilite aluminium girders, climbing, creeping, swinging, leaping everywhere with a post-feminist interpretation that uses the SCUM text ironically and blames Hercules for killing the kids (Euripides was just a male whitewash).

From the central image of the golden fleece - the male craves the company of women in the mystical belief that by touching gold he'll turn to gold - to SCUM's "emotional parasite and therefore not ethically entitled to live" it is as dazzling mentally as it is physically exhausting just to watch these muscular performances.

I thought that between them Paul Davies, Nike Imoru, Fern Smith and Simon Thorp expressed all the tensions of the sex war in Janek Alexander's production. "Soft porn meets Spare Rib", a friend said. Well, yes, isn't that what it's all about? As I drove home Prince Edward's outriders swarmed around. He'd missed a treat.

Robin Thornber


The Observer

But for sheer visual flair and raw energy, Volcano Theatre's Medea: SexWar (Theatre Workshop) takes some beating. Two women and two men use their voices and bodies like lethal weapons to relate Tony Harrison's version of the Medea legend, intercut with passages from the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto.


Plays & Players

Swansea's touring Volcano Theatre Company is the kind of ensemble that deserves recognition, but the company's show may well go largely unnoticed by the capital's press since it was only in London for just over a week. I saw their adaptation of Tony Harrison's Medea: SexWar - a pungent, healthily irreverent marriage of the Medea legend, Harrison's striking verse, and parts of Valerie Solanis' manifesto for SCUM (The Society for Cutting Up Men)- at the ICA in April. Like their confrontational, bare-knuckles adaptation of Harrison's poem V, seen at Edinburgh and Waterman Arts Centre last year, Medea: SexWar showed how well the young company fuse the exhilarating physicality of the best dance theatre with an intellectual punch which is every bit as stimulating. It's a rare company indeed that sets the adrenaline as well as the mental juices pumping.

NC


Manchester Evening News

This being the Green Room, and not the Royal Exchange, you'd expect the Volcano Theatre Company to be different in their reworking of the Greek tale of forbidden love.

The Medea across the road, so to speak, is not one I have seen but if it comes close to this in its invention and dynamism then we have been doubly blessed.

Split into three frenetic acts, Tony Harrison's Medea: SexWar threads the simmering conflict between the sexes with so much zest it quickly becomes a rewarding piece of theatre. Even when Harrison contrives to weave a thoroughly modern sexual manifesto into the original text he manages to do it so that you don't see the join. The SCUM manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) allows the four highly accomplished performers, Paul Davies, Nike Imoru, Simon Thorp and Fern Smith, full vent to anarchic style as well as their physical endurance. All movement is wonderfully choreographed and uncompromising.

In the space of 80 minutes, we get villainy, extremism, revenge, daring, and most of all, the two women in the cast revelling in their anything-goes role. They challenged and pushed back the frontiers of acceptable behaviour with such controlled venom, no man could forget the warning: "If SCUM ever strikes, it'll be in the dark with a six-inch blade."

Carl Palmer


South China Morning Post, January 6 1992

Medea, seized by Jason along with the Golden Fleece, was a demonic witch. She wreaked murderous vengeance when Jason later replaced her with a new, sweeter choice of wife. Her character, painted by Euripides in his tragedy, has been handed down as a cautionary example of the cruelty and emotional intensity of which the spurned female is capable.

Enter Volcano Theatre Company, to put the historical record straight and speak out for femalekind by presenting the woman's offensive in the age-old battle of the sexes.

The fabric of the show is drawn from two main sources. Fragments of the modern libretto of Medea, written by Tony Harrison for the English National Opera Company, are interwoven with contoversial text from the SCUM manifesto, the radical and violent programme for a feminist revolution devised by the Society for Cutting up Men.

The Medea myth lends itself well to reinterpretation in a radical feminist context. All the emotive ingredients of sex war are there - a rigorously empowered woman who brings Jason success in his legendary quest only to see him hailed a her while she is soon rejected for a politically more advantageous match.

In Volcano's highly polished and relentlessly physical portrayal, the control, energy andextraordinary physical prowess of the two female members of the cast is starkly contrasted with enweakened and caricatured male counterparts.

The stereotypes of the modern stage (in which women are facets of character defined in relation to men - sexual beauty, mother, nagging wife etc - while men are fully defined characters of action) are nearly inverted. Here, the women master the stage, empowered, muscular, acrobatic, endlessly energetic, engineering and supporting.

Males are reduced to a single comic dimension. Jason, motivated not by heroism but by bawdy sexual lust, is emasculated through effeminate stage gesture and cowardly arrogance. Hercules, the other prominent model of maleness, is brainless brawn, fearful of women and taking refuge in brutish machismo.

The densely lyrical poetry of Harrison's Medea, agressively and hypnotically chanted, underlines the theme of male-female power struggle implicit in this telling of the story. SCUM takes the sex war a stage further, ordering the ideas behind it into a political thesis with its call for the violent overthrow of male society.

The lasting memories of Volcano's Medea are of physically immediate and invigorating theatre, played out skilfully and courageously in a minimal set of border scaffolding, used to full creative and claustrophobic effect.

Jill McGivering