Director Olivier Diepenhorst pulls his Mamma Medea far away from all antique decorum

In Mama Medea Tom Lanoye makes the unimaginable imaginable: that killing can be a last way of loving. In 2001, the Flemish writer not only wrote a new version of the famous Greek tragedy Medeia (431 BC) by Euripides – to which the title character owes her ruthless reputation as a child murderer – he also links her previous history to it. This makes you feel more deeply about her furious act of desperation after she is exchanged for a younger woman by her status-driven husband Jason.

Lanoye is starting to be Medea with an adventurous version of the argonautics (c. 250 BC). In this epic by Appolinius of Rhodes, a shrewd Jason sails with boat and companions to savage Kolchis to steal back the Golden Fleece. As an envoy of the Greek ‘civilization’, he makes clever use of ‘all barbarism’: he withstands trials thanks to the magical powers of the then unknown Medea. This king’s daughter gives up everything for him: family, country, culture. She betrays her father and brother in exchange for Jason’s word of undying loyalty. If he breaks that, she draws her last trump card in the card game of love.

Lanoye also weaves in a hint of migrant issues, about how a displaced woman tries to survive in an unfamiliar culture that dismisses her as a sorcerer: ‘A stranger, they say, you can never know. There’s a wall that won’t break. Between the familiar and the displaced.’ But above all, Lanoye allows these worlds to collide within a love relationship. He mixes a big splash Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? through: Medea meets Marthaa. When the deceived mother lashes out at her husband in biting verses as a ‘barking howler buoy’, he bluntly calls her a ‘human-sized cockroach’: ‘If this is a marriage, every civil war is one.’ After which the maid summarizes the relationship crisis: ‘It turns out that the marriage is worn out. worn out? There are fish on dry land that have stayed fresh longer.’

Director Olivier Diepenhorst draws his Mama Medea, now made by Theatergroep Suburbia, far away from all antique decorum, in favor of a youthful, tingling clash between Jason and Medea. Charlie Chan Dagelet as Medea gives a fiery swing to ‘the whole witchcraft of love’, she trembles ‘from crown to foot’, she generously sprinkles iambic five-legged friends without turning it into lofty poetry. She flashes her eyes, licks her lips with her tongue and hops with gusto on the jetty around the black snow-strewn floor. It changes from island to ‘a love nest permeated with dung’. Stefan Rokebrand flirts with a nice practical verbal sobriety. His Jason is not a tough Greek, but a charming, frivolous polder man. They are surrounded by four actors in double roles, recognizable by costume details such as rolled-up knee socks or pulled up sports socks. Sometimes they playfully and childishly tell about violent dramas (Rosa Kreulen and Bart Bijnens), sometimes they appear spiritually out of the dark (Mike Lebanon), sometimes they naively and brashly provide a cheerful note (Damaris de Jong). That does not make the drama any less: everyone loses offspring here. And then Jason also turns out to be an accomplice in the murder.