Shaw on Medea

[lead]One of UCC’s most famous alumni returns to talk about entrapment, killing children and the Beckhams[/lead][hr gap="2"]Best known to the majority of readers as the shrieking and spiteful Aunt Petunia in the wildly successful Harry Potter films, for over 30 years Fiona Shaw has been steadily working on stage and screen, turning in acclaimed performances in projects as diverse as the aforementioned Harry Potter, Hedda Gabler, The Avengers (no, not that one; the 1998 one…) and True Blood. She has also turned her hand to theatre, directing on several occasions, most recently helming Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia on the 2013 Glyndebourne tour.The actress, who graduated with a BA from UCC in ’79, arrived here last week to act as a keynote speaker at a UCC Conference on Euripides’s famous play Medea, a role which she has played to rave reviews across the world.In person she is far removed from the cruel aunt who forced Harry to live in a cupboard under the stairs in those wizard movies that were kind of popular a few years back, appearing as an intelligent, thoughtful woman and speaking with unbound enthusiasm on the subject of the play, which is clearly close to her heart.Though the play Medea was written and first performed over 2,400 years ago, Shaw was keen to stress that as an actress there are always new ways of interpreting such a complex character, whereupon each new performance can bring its own hidden depths and dimensions.“We performed it over in Boston where a man actually died while watching it... So it must have had some sort of effect – something must have happened!”Being essentially the story of a scorned woman who avenges her husband’s betrayal of her by slaying their children, you could hardly be blamed for seeing Medea as the villain of the piece. Not so, says Shaw. In her view the character is far more sympathetic than that and the performance of the play serves to sell this.“In a way it is an act of seduction. Every step of the way the audience is agreeing with Medea in the argument, which she obviously doesn’t know the end of at the beginning. She says: ‘He’s done this, I can’t go there. I’ve now killed his wife and I’m going to be murdered, and so are my children.’ You can hear the chorus say ‘There is one thing you can do.’“So it’s about entrapment, and it is more relevant now too – never have we been in a world which is more in that precarious state than we are in now. Every day in the paper you might read a story about somebody killing their children and you can be well sure there’s a story behind it, because nobody sets out to kill their children.“Nobody wants to kill their children and the terror of the play comes from people’s fear of a woman who would do such a thing.”As Shaw sees it Medea is simply a woman forced to confront a terrible situation and failing under the pressure. The plays themes run startlingly close to the reality; “When I played her, people said to me ‘I would hate to have you babysit my children,’ but it has nothing to do with that.“It is an aspect of the human mind being looked at and it’s terrifyingly real actually. In fact, after more than 2,000 years of science the one thing that has not changed is the one thing that we discover through the Greeks and the Greek renaissance – that vengeance continues despite the intervention of a thing called democracy.“We are indoctrinated with the apparent success of democracy, but what actually goes on is vengeance, vengeance, vengeance. You can’t run a society on vengeance though; you can only create a society where we have nominal punishments instead of valid punishments for every cruelty that happens.”Shaw implies that the viewer is in some ways implicit in Medea’s actions, empathising with the character for much of the play. “Medea deals with this domestic passion, that overrides everything else and what we do with it, because on one hand we romanticise it.”Fiona and Director Deborah Warner, with whom she collaborated on their 2001 production of Medea, looked to an unlikely source when putting their version of play together. “We watched a film on the Beckhams for this.” (Me: “The Beckhams?” Shaw: “Yes, those Beckhams!”)“They are a couple who were raised right up in society and that’s very much who we thought Medea and Jason were. Jason is hailed almost as a sports hero and he is welcomed everywhere. And that’s as far as it goes with the Beckhams, thankfully!”She makes the point that both couples are simply two different sides of the same coin. “So you have a couple who are very famous; but just suppose something went wrong there and one of them was kicked out of the country. You’re into a public humiliation, as well as private anguish and the consequences for public figures in these situations.“In Medea’s case she is humiliated because her husband is going to be married and she has been told to leave. Why? Because the King says the marriage doesn’t really count. Very quickly you get on her side without knowing where her actions might lead.”

In a way it is an act of seduction. Every step of the way the audience is agreeing with Medea in the argument, which she obviously doesn’t know the end of at the beginning.

The play bears many parallels to the modern age, and this can be seen in a lot of contemporary theatre and literature.“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is another play which is so praised for being banter between a husband and wife as they sort of eat each other alive - that spark of wit between husband and wife. How foolish women find men and how foolish men find women.“In Medea those things are right there at the beginning – we actually found it very funny and the audience found it funny. Then, of course, it quickly stops being funny and things go very wrong... but there is no implicit wrong in Medea. She is simply an aspect of the darkest part of human entrapment.”Having been a student in UCC herself and knowing first-hand what that entails, Fiona’s advice for any student wishing to break into the world of acting is quick and to the point: “Go to a drama school and be trained. It’s a long a complex road that requires dedication, more than you know... But the rewards are great.”It’s simple, really.