“I Am Not Interested in Heroes and Villains”: An Interview with Dhyan Ruparel on Medea

The notion that tragedy is the genre of conflict, of true moral dilemma, emanates from Dhyan Ruparel’s dazzling and tragic BAME-casted Medea. Medea murders her own children to avenge her betrayer, Jason; the play plunges us into this moral mess and holds us under. “I am not interested in heroes and villains”, Ruparel says, “I’m interested in the concepts of exile that affect equally all minorities and which lead to cycles of violence and conflict.”  

The chorus’ plural role allows for this: four torch-bearing witnesses, always present in the background, policing and watching Medea’s every move, and yet sympathetic exiles themselves. Medea pleads, “no don’t pity me, be fair with me, listen to me”, “I can only ask for your forgiveness”. Medea’s costuming moves in reverse: from red to white, she grows paradoxically clearer in her purpose and more violent in her actions, which only deepens the ambiguity.  Jason’s breakdown at the murder of his children breaks away from his cold viciousness. Pity and fear towards both sides are maintained, and the result is a dark and deeply dramatic tragedy. This is dilemma, muddle, chaos.  

Ruparel makes it clear that this is a play about “what it means to feel foreign in a world that doesn’t welcome you”. Medea, exiled from her homeland, is already fallen at the play’s beginning, breathlessly dramatic, broken like the crumbling white set. When Rob Monteiro’s cold Creon threatens to exile her, she faces a double estrangement, “and so I leave every bit as foreign as I came”. The concept of foreignness itself is made unstable and uncomfortable; Medea says to Jason, “I made myself a foreigner for you, and now I have become foreign to you.” True homeland is never found for Medea, until she reaches for the ladder in the final scene, calling for her murdered boys, coming home to them. This, for me, is the scene of most anguish and pathos. 

Passing an anti-Farage street campaign on the way to watch the exiled Medea felt bizarre. “I knew this was urgent”, Ruparel tells me. In the interval, with Mina Strevens’ Medea still frantically spiralling onstage, 431BC and 2026 come into urgent contact, Medea’s dislocation only more pronounced.  

As an audience, we are in many ways made to feel ‘foreignness’. Ruparel says, “the main thing I’ve used to make the audience feel foreign is the multilingualism”. The chorus brings Spanish, Arabic and Chinese to their parts, languages based on the actors’ own heritage. “They collapse into the language from their homeland, and the audience doesn’t understand it, it is an alienating device”. He also speaks about the importance of timelessness to the play. Sadie Hodges’ set blurs crumbling Greek walls with Lego children’s toys and postal packages. We are disorientated, unfamiliar, foreign. 

The variety of stage proxemics used is impressive; Jason zigzags the space, his physical dominance filling it, furthering the tense volatility that Will Atiomo brings to the character. Medea and Jason sporadically swap places on the raised central platform, making the power struggle physical. There are sudden entrances and exits, there is pacing and the fetching of drinks. The play makes vivid the instability and fluctuation that Medea faces as an exile.  

This fluctuation is reflected in Rich Mandal’s score. The live music completely transforms the production; its quivering strings and chaotic jazz elements bring heightened tension and release, disorientation. As Ruparel says, “the score is almost its own character in the play”. 

Mina Strevens’ performance is a tour de force. She stabilises heightened emotional climax with slow and sonorous contemplation, a cadence that is captivating. Her singing provides a beautiful episode of grief, where Medea reaches for song in place of speech. Indira Mehta’s Nurse balances tragic catastrophe with solemn and loyal sturdiness. 

The violence takes place off-stage; Ruparel says, “I’m not interested in fetishising violence on stage, but I’m interested in its consequences, its implications”. And yet the play still conveys a ferocious savagery that makes it truly and classically tragic. 

Edited by Polly Bigham.