Deadly Theater Meets Dead Horse

Fiona Shaw in full battle cry is a force of army engineering more than nature—or even acting for that matter. Not that she isn't carrying an arsenal of acting tricks at every turn. A master of both rant and silence, she sweeps past the narrative hurdles in Richard II, Eliot's Waste Land, and more recently, Euripides' Medea as if texts exist mainly to be crushed into submission by an unbridled will to own the acting universe. Along the way she calls upon voice, voice, and more voice, now caressing some soft consonants, now heaving extended phrases into unguarded air, sustaining them in a pitched, fluting tremble that wishes to be music when it is only monolith. Every note, every gesture emerges from calculation more than thought, and heaven help the other actors caught in her fireworks power. Her Jason in Medea (Jonathan Cake) attempts to outshout her at the obvious junctures, and he's capable of matching her serpentine sinew with buffed muscle that ought to humble her; but apart from the way the text is meant to settle things, he hasn't a fighting chance anyway, so driven is she by forces in her head that defy argument at every turn. Even if I didn't know that her boys are doomed, I can see the end in every beginning because she can't stop herself from starting at the end.

"Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll?" asks a woman in the Chorus, burdened with a Scottish accent in Deborah Warner's updated high-tech production, which features Plexiglas and a center-stage wading pool that share in the general placelessness so celebrated these days when visual chic assumes greater importance than textual illumination. There's no doubt about the avalanche starting to roll, but where's the grief? Even in momentary pause, following an opening sequence in which both Nurse and Chorus flail from one side to another like bumper cars babbling in run-on sentences, Shaw's Medea can only sidle slowly from the wings, wearing shades; within seconds it's clear that this arranged silence carries only the meaning of its contrast with the frenzy that precedes it. More a program note than a conveyed idea, it is signaling the news that Medea must have been in tears recently, but given all the obvious contemporary associations, it can also be seen as a fashion statement or the gesture of a movie star (try Alexandra del Lago in Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth)

noisily trying not to call attention to herself by calling attention to herself. Then she speaks in four short bursts, ever so conversationally: "My lovely life is lost. [Pause.] I want to die. [Pause.] He's the vilest man alive [pause] my husband." At which point she laughs, thus eliciting the same from her audience; finally she says, "I am a souvenir from foreign parts," this time punctuated not by a pause but a kick back of one foot from the knee—still another solicitation of laughter from an audience now gaga in anticipation. All these controlling devices can be construed as Medea's, of course, but as they take over the instrument and the narrative, they set up barriers against the original, primeval events peculiar to Attic tragedy in favor of actorial display: a show of feeling, not the thing itself.

Then, too, she exhibits an alarmingly literal mind...