Co-created, directed and performed with THE oPERA PROJECT INC. 

Director: Nigel Kellaway
Performers: Peretta Anggerek, Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway
Musicians: Michael Bell, Nigel Ubrihien, Margaret Howard, Catherine Tabrett
Music: Louis Nicholas Clérambault, Francis Poulenc, Melissa Seeto
Lighting Design: Simon Wise
Costumes: Annemaree Dalziel

Premiered: 30th April 2003 at Performance Space, Sydney

You have to know someone very well indeed to unerringly home in on and bring out their worst every time – or, in the case of Kellaway and Heilmann, their best, as in this production. A lively conversation with opera in its high art form … the sumptuous artificiality that is opera. The pierced, tattooed, half-naked body-builder is not our usual image of an opera singer, and Anggerek embodying Medea the foreigner, Medea the enchantress is a reminder that things aren’t always what they seem and assumptions can be dangerous. That Kellaway revels in language and music and their interplay is clear. The sung and spoken texts are better integrated here than ever before, and they work powerfully off one another. … The opera Project at its most accessible yet.”

Laura Ginters, RealTime June-July, 2003
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The opera Project has a very different starting point for each new work it makes. It might be a socio-political concern. It might be a particular text and/or attendant philosophy. Common to all works is how the performance of music impacts on theatrical articulacy, and how well all aspects of the material serve as a vehicle for the collaborating artists. Sometimes a particular musical text (generally non-operatic) triggers a new work. In this case the work is a rarely performed cantata by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1710). The subject matter? The murderous and infanticidal Medea, and Clérambault has a very interesting “take” on the myth.
Ovid’s story of Medea is a revenge myth. It’s true relevance lies in the myriad ways in which Western culture has chosen to interpret the story and applied it to contemporary events and consciousness.

There is no “one” Medea. Ovid’s mythical Jason, on an absurd quest, slaughters the citizens and rulers of Colchis and takes as his trophy their princess, the beautiful Medea. Oddly enough, they appear to fall in love. They settle and have kids on another foreign shore and confront all the usual immigration red tape. Jason’s solution to their troubles is rather clumsy – he marries the King’s daughter. His partner, Medea, is “a tad put out”.

The late 20th century East German playwright, Heiner Müller, describes the story of Jason as the earliest representation of colonisation in Greek legend:
The end signifies the threshold where myth turns into history: Jason is eventually slain by his boat … European history began with colonisation … That the vehicle of colonisation strikes the coloniser dead anticipates the end of it. That’s the threat of the end we are facing, the ‘end of growth’.

Louis-Nicolas Clérambault’s early 18th century cantata reads the story as a psychologically complex “revenge tragedy”. Interestingly, and perhaps cogniscent of contemporary moral squeamishness, he finishes his work short of Medea’s savage infanticide.

In researching many interpretations of the myth we noted that Medea and Jason’s relationship supposedly lasted ten or more years. The beginning and ending of their lives together has been quite spectacularly chronicled, but nothing has been invented regarding their middle years. Should we be concerned about this gap? Or is the purpose of myths merely to create iconic certainties? Further research reminded us that “mud-slinging” has always been a reliable mainstay of the theatre, and few writers in the 20th century canon have plumbed the depths of middle-aged dysfunction as sensationally as Edward Albee, in his subconscious treatment of Medea’s and Jason’s wrestling match.

What are we to present? Ovid? Euripides? Heiner Muller? Clérambault? Albee? They are all profound readings of this myth.

And so..The opera Project’s Another Night : Medea – endeavouring to discuss the “relatively” recent positioning of theatre as a psycho-analytical forum, and to consider how myths have been quite differently interpreted in the artistic canon of earlier centuries – all pertaining to where we locate art in our collective self-awareness.