A World That Doesn’t Welcome You: Inside Dhyan Ruparel’s Dazzling Medea

by Zoë Charlotte Green

We enter to a projected screen: “this is a play / about a woman who / beheads her brother / stabs her children / and sends her lover’s / wife up in flames.” The ending is handed to us immediately. And yet, for the entirety of Dhyan Ruparel’s production, we are gripped. Not by suspense, exactly, but by something more agonising: the sense that it could have gone differently. Auden wrote of tragedy as the drama of possibility rather than necessity, and this Medea embeds that distinction into its very structure. We don’t watch a woman destroyed by fate; we watch a woman destroyed by the choices made around her, and the ones she makes in response. 

The staging is immediately arresting: the destroyed walls of what might once have been a home, now mossy and crumbling. Sadie Hodges’ set gives us the shape of a house without the substance of one. Medea is an alien here, as she has been everywhere: excluded by race, by gender, by the sheer force of what she has done and what has been done to her. Modern children’s toys sit alongside contemporary architecture, letters and fragments. This is not a story situated in a time period. It is untethered, deliberately so – and that dislocation speaks directly to the experience it depicts. 

The production is at one point lit with torches that turn on the audience. It is physically a small gesture, but one with enormous weight: we are held accountable, we are witnesses. The action happens on the steps at the foreground of the stage, with the chorus behind and above, judging, witnessing, accompanying. Rich Mandal’s live music threads through it all, Greek and Eastern influences interwoven with progressive and punk rock, escalating precisely when the drama does. Being able to see the composer in action is wonderful, and the music is exquisitely beautiful. 

Mina Strevens carries Medea with the mannerisms of a woman already broken when we meet her, and yet there is a terrible vitality to it. She has been exiled twice (once from her homeland, once from the life she remade here) and what is left is someone who has been so desensitised to pain that she can find something almost pleasurable in the retelling of it. The scene with the nurse is devastating: if there is any capacity for love left in Medea, it lives there. The feminist current running through the production is not subtle, nor should it be. She is presented as dangerous and unhinged, and what the production argues, insistently, is that she is simply trying to survive. Elevated physically on a platform, and yet without power. 

Will Atiomo’s Jason is excellent: the passive-aggressive tension of a man who has convinced himself of his own reasonableness. When he occupies the platform, he has genuine dominion over the space. The language throughout is potential and counterfactual: “I wish”, “what if”. The tragedy is in the conditional.  

Her boys are never staged, and I believe it to be the right decision. Their absence is more present than any appearance could have been, and when Medea is finally reunited with them in her ascent of the illuminated ladder, it is both transcendent and unbearable. The chorus, whose lines were devised and developed by the actors themselves, offer different viewpoints throughout: they are not a monolith of judgment but a set of individual voices, people with their own relationships to foreignness and belonging, asking whether Medea’s grief is excessive, offering not kindness but fairness. 

Ruparel has spoken about being drawn to this play as a descendant of immigrants, interested in the interplay between political and personal – in a UK experiencing a rise of fascism and anti-immigration rhetoric. Casting BME actors and building a BME production team is not incidental to this version: it is the version. The point is not to update the play but to reclaim it, to insist that these stories belong to people who have inherited them differently than those who first wrote them down. Ruparel’s version is not set in any particular land, and Jason is an exile too – what exiles do to each other is one of the production’s most cutting questions. 

This is not an easy play, and this is not a production that tidies it up; there are loose moral threads, and the play brings up problems without finding solutions. Medea has justified what she does in her own mind – she brought her children into this world; she believes she must take them out, and whether we find that coherent or not, we are never allowed to simply dismiss her. How do you judge a soul that is so empty and lost? is the question it leaves us with. The answer is slowly, letting it all percolate. 

The MedeaX talk with Dr Shushma Malik added a further layer. There is not one canonical Medea; the text is malleable, and this production is organic. What Euripides meant by writing “people as they are” is precisely that the play survives, being inherited by each new generation. This is a 2,456-year-old piece of writing responding to the current moment, and the universality of it – immigrant guilt, the pain of a life “so far from what I expected”, the betrayal of someone you gave everything to – only sharpens the play’s specificity. Rather, it reminds us that marginalised people are people with emotions, complex and messy ones. It is a sad play, and the 2,456 years have not made it any easier to sit with. 

Photo Credits: Aya Krstonosic and Anna Gungaloo. Images licensed for Media Use by the “Medea” usage.