Daniel Evans can’t quite get the Ancient Greeks out of his head.
While the award-winning playwright and director has often remixed Greek theatre tropes and plot lines into his own written work, from May 11 at the Bille Brown Theatre in South Brisbane Evans’s direction of Queensland Theatre’s production of Medea will be the likes of which you haven’t seen before.
Why is that? For starters, the eponymous character is conspicuously absent and instead we focus on Medea’s two sons, who are locked in their room, and who we know are condemned to die by her very hand.
Ordinarily, this chilling scene is referenced obliquely at the play’s end. Here, in an urgent and imaginative adaptation from Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks, the two boys sit front and centre for the entire performance.
“It’s a really big role for these young people,” Evans says. “They’re on stage for 85 minutes and they never leave the stage once the show starts. There’s no lights down, there’s no exit and, so, it’s a big, big task. We’re trying to make sure we scaffold it in such a way that they feel as confident and as safe as possible.”
The lead roles have been double cast – with Jeremiah Rees and Orlando Dunn-Mura playing Leon (Hercules) and Edward Hill and Felix Pearn as Jasper (Cornelius) – with rehearsals coinciding with the Easter holidays so that the performers could prepare outside the school term.
Evans explains that the play’s creators Mulvany and Sarks were moved to reinvent the story following the tragic death of Darcey Freeman, the little girl who was thrown off a bridge in Melbourne by her father in 2009. It was the heartbreaking testimony of Darcey’s brother that unlocked the vital question at the heart of this reworked Medea.
“What if we haven’t seen all the sides of the story?” Evans offers “What if we explored this myth from the viewpoint of the two people who have been silenced?
“What you get is a very special gift … you don’t get these big grand heroic speeches from Medea or Jason (whose quest is the Golden Fleece). There is no 20 women of Corinth in chorus belting out advice to the protagonist. There is just two little people in a room reckoning with a giant drama that’s about to unfold outside the bedroom door.
“And what you’re given is basically this beautiful gift of living with these two children in what will effectively become the last hour of their lives.”
Evans’s past work, Oedipus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, arrived like a bolt from the heavens when it won the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award in 2014. I watched the play during its development, and even without costumes, sets or blocking, the story was thrillingly modern and antipodean, while retaining the power of its ancient magic.
Evans has unfinished business with this particular Medea – he was ready to stage a production for QT in 2020 when “a little virus came along and meant that wasn’t possible”.
While the young age of the characters meant that new performers had to be cast for this production, almost all of the original creatives chose to return to collaborate and finally see it to opening night.
For Evans, the “colossal” roles of Greek theatre – like Oedipus, Medea and Antigone – are yet to be trumped theatrically, and will always endure.
“It’s not about being in love or not being in love, it’s about being so in love I will take the lives of your children,” Evans explains.
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“Or being so incensed by injustice that I will defy the law of man and invoke the law of the gods and bury my brother. Being so capsized by the tyranny of hubris that you think you are undefeatable – and then you end up being married to your mother.
“So, I kind of love the stakes and the passion and the high theatricality of all these stories.”
Medea plays Bille Brown Theatre, South Brisbane, May 11 to June 8.
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