Meditating On Medea

Sydney's stages have seen myths done in some interesting ways recently – a contemporary, featherweight Thyestes that packed a heavyweight punch; a sexy and soaked adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and now, Medea, Euripides' tale of revenge wreaked by a woman scorned – the cost of which includes the lives of her two children – reworked by Kate Mulvany and Anne-Lousie Sarks, who will also direct the production, coming to Belvoir's Downstairs Theatre in association with Australian Theatre for Young People.

In this version of the story, viewed from the periphery, the tragic events unfold in the peripheries as centre stage the two doomed children play – we see this story from their perspective. “I'm quite drawn to the Greeks,” says Sarks, “and it's a good story, really fertile and malleable and there's heaps that you can do with it, and especially as a contemporary theatremaker, I can do anything I want to it, and that's quite exciting.

“I was also really curious about the engery of kids on stage – I'd seen a version of A Doll's House where this child was brought out at the end – when Nora's deciding whether to leave her husband and her kids or stay – and this child came out and it just changed the play; it went from being a play to having this real person on stage and it shifted the perspective for me of what that moment meant, it felt so real. So I wondered what would happen if that was a whole work, if that wasn't just a walk-by moment but the children were at the centre of that, how would we relate to that? How would we experience that? Would the air in the theatre feel different?”

They're large questions, and ones that Sarks has grappled with over extensive rehearsals and workshops with the young stars of the production, Joseph Kelly, 14, and Rory Potter, 11, (both with little to no prior performance experience), from which Mulvany drew to write the work.

So, five weeks into rehearsals, how do Kelly and Potter see their take on this ancient Greek epic? “It's kind of modern day, it's not like Ancient Greece. We're just two kids,” says Potter. “We've been locked up,” adds Kelly. “Yeah,” Potter confirms enthusiastically. “Our parents are fighting and getting divorced and then our dad has this 'special friend'.”

“Which is his girlfriend,” clarifies Kelly, “And the mum hates her, so much.” “Mmm,” more agreement from Potter. “And the mum's kind of like really sad because she ran away from home with him. Our characters just don't get why they're acting so weird. We don't get why they don't get back together.”

“We're just being lied to, I guess,” Kelly suggests. “We're just like, 'Why is mum acting so weird?'” adds Potter, “We don't really realise what's actually happening. At the end we're just thinking it's a great big adventure.”

“Yeah, so, a massive lie. And now we're going to die,” Kelly gives a sense of the epic's 'tragedy' before continuing, “We've been separated from the real world. We don't have a phone or anything that can tell us what's happening or anything.”

And I ask: Almost like prisoners then? “Yeah,” says Kelly. “But with toys. And nice beds.”