Suzie Miller’s Medea dissects gender and stereotype. (Credit: Dylan Evans)
Acclaimed Australian playwright Suzie Miller’s Medea will be a multi-layered exploration of a woman’s journey through love, betrayal, rejection, revenge and murder.
‘Medea was a young woman who left her father and her homeland, and killed her brother trying to escape, to be with her lover Jason. ‘Jason then leaves her to marry the princess of the land so that he can become royalty. Outraged, Medea ends up killing his princess bride-to-be and her children as revenge against Jason,’ says Miller.
The decisions Medea takes to change the course of her life display a brilliant yet criminal mind operating on a psychological terrain with several dimensions to it.
‘The play will be a gripping psychological thriller of sorts, but also an examination of the intelligent, complex and ultimately criminal mind of a woman who has slipped from a certain position into committing crimes which are unthinkable.
‘How does that happen to an intelligent woman? Well that’s what Chris and I are looking at and developing,’ says Miller.
The production will be Artistic Director Chris Kohn’s directorial debut at La Boite. Set in a universal space, rather than a specific city or country, the play also explores gender roles and ‘appropriate’ behaviour.
‘Medea’s not a woman who is lost to her passions as such. She’s not a stereotypical “hysterical” woman.
‘Rather, she is a woman whose power has been shunted, and who in many ways has been rejected by communities and therefore acts outside of the boundaries of what’s considered “appropriate”,’ says Miller.
Miller believes Medea breaks the rules of being a daughter by leaving her father, of being a sister by murdering her brother, of a lover by not accepting Jason’s rejection and also as a mother who kills her children.
‘So, all of the roles that women play within their relationships, she challenges the rules of each one of those.’
‘Euripides might have been one of the original male feminists who could see in many ways that she was other, she wouldn’t conform and was maligned because of that, which further encouraged her to non-conform.’
Having studied infanticide as part of her Masters degree, Miller says that the elements that drive women to kill their children are not quite what people might think.
‘There is a slippage that happens and you start to lose power and you find yourself in a condition that there’s no way out but to kill these children.
‘And it wasn’t that she wasn’t a loving mother – she loved her kids. But what was it that got her to the point where she could actually kill them. We really want to put Medea under the microscope to see how she got to that point,’ adds Miller.
Medea will open in May next year. To book tickets click here.
