Review by
Raymond Ramcharitar
It's supremely ironic that in this season of the Prime Minister taking licks for comments about women's irresponsibility in choosing partners, a play, Carnival Medea, which might vindicate him, should start its run.
Carnival Medea is a strange transposition of Euripides' Medea from pre-Christian era Greece to the West Indies in the 1930s. It was co-written by Rhoma Spencer and Prof Shirlene Holmes of Georgia State University in the US. It's strange because the action and plot of the story do not fit well in the West Indian geographic and cultural spaces of the period. And the emotional and psychological intricacies are apparently too complex to be expressed in the Carnival vernacular.
Medea is one of the most contemporary of the Greek plays. Its eponymous heroine is the one of the first anti-heroines in Western literature. Medea is Jason's wife whom he met in Colchis during his search for the Golden Fleece. She betrayed her family, killed her brother and used her magic to help him. He married her and took her to Greece with him.
As the original play opens, Medea is in deep grief at Jason's decision to leave her for Glauce, daughter of the Corinthian king, Creon. To compound it, Medea receives word she has been banished from Corinth for threatening the King and his daughter. After Jason attempts to justify and rationalise his betrayal, Medea, overcome by the passion and the desire for revenge, uses her magic to murder Glauce and her own children.
Carnival Medea puts the title character in Trinidad in the 1930s. She (Tishanna Williams) has fled Grenada with Jason (Joseph Jomo Pierre) and their sons, to Trinidad. As the play opens, she has received the news that Jason is to marry a "red woman"-the Governor's (Kearn Samuel) outside daughter.
The characters are dressed as "traditional" Carnival characters. A chorus of dame lorraines (macomeres) flits around Carnival Medea, offering advice, comfort, and occasionally opprobrium. A pierrot looks after her sons. Jason is a stickfighter. The governor is a midnight robber. The Greek gods, Jove and company, are replaced with the Orisa gods, Ogun and company.
The biggest problem is that the story and setting don't hold together. The details of the action aren't plausible (or even readily discernible given the way the lines are delivered) in the setting. In the first place, there is no equivalent for Medea's magic and heroism in the West Indies except obeah, which isn't adequate. This deficiency also precludes Carnival Medea's escape in the last scene of the play. Medea has a chariot provided by the Sun God, her grandfather. Carnival Medea has an old mas' costume.
The desertion and re-marriage theme might be as old as marriage, but much more is needed in this new setting to drive the heroine to kill her children. After all polygamy (by whatever name) was widely practiced at the time in Trinidad. It's not impossible to conceive a woman responding by murdering her children and her rival in the milieu, but the psychological buildup to the moment in the characters' actions, thoughts and interaction, is crucial to establish its believability.
That progression is absent in Carnival Medea. The only emotional expressions available in the Carnival vernacular (as it's deployed or interpreted here) are basic emotions, which are amplified by volume. Anger, rage, jealousy, resentment, hysteria are in abundance. But there's no sign of the subtler emotions: quiet, reflective grief instead of tortured anguish; the turns of the deep currents of passion rather than surface passionate intensity; the transition from the logic of a spurned wife to a vengeful force of nature in the crucial scene with Jason.
The limited emotional scope of the play is so pointed that Medea's emotional transitions seem more like schizophrenia than grief conquered by rage and revenge. The "Carnival" tableaux, the dances, characters, the calypso and the Orisa dance numbers, do nothing to advance the plot or clarify any of its themes; they just seem gratuitous.
Carnival Medea, if you think of it, would fit much better into the early 21st century than the 1930s. The modern corporate environment is more analogous to the Greek city state than the modern nation. I'm not sure how the Carnival element could be worked in, but Carnival would have to be more than fanciful folk or ethnic mythology posing as "tradition". Some actual thought would have to go into shaping an idiom, not just throwing "folk" characters onto the stage and making them scream and gyrate.
Unfortunately, this is just what happens. The script and transposition weren't thought-out, and confusion showed at key moments: why did they leave Grenada? If Medea killed someone there, the police would be after her in Trinidad. Original Medea was a descendant of the gods so her threat to Creon was real. What exactly makes Carnival Medea special? How could a working class woman threaten the life of the governor of the colony as to attract his attention and not just be thrown in jail? How could an adventurer from Grenada reach so high above himself on the social scale to the governor's outside daughter? Impossible in 1930s Trinidad.
Those fairly major details aside, a good bit of the original script makes its way into this one. The actress in the lead, however, just wasn't capable of the subtlety required to paint a multilayered character, and neither were most of the cast. The most experienced actresses, Cecelia Salazar, Penelope Spencer and Susan Hannays were lumped in an ill-used chorus of Macomere Dame Lorraines.
Such an experiment, trying to ingest a canonical work into a local form, was tried before with Carnival Messiah. This seems to be an emerging theme in the Carnival oeuvre: to marry itself to canonical Western works for legitimacy. If the lack of success of these two works shows anything, it's that the Carnival, as conceived and theorised at present, cannot support the artistic weight of this ambition.
It's not that such ambition is unrealisable, it's just that much more imaginative and intellectual work are necessary than was evident here. Though it's possible that metropolitan critics' expectations of "Carnivalism" are so low they applaud it, thus encouraging a vicious cycle of underachievement.
But an opportunity was missed here. Discussion of the complexities of a woman's rage and entrapment by social conventions are especially relevant here and now in the land of Carnival. Domestic violence and murder are on the rise, and the establishment and those in authority seem ignorant of the deep and superficial causes.
Medea offers an insight into the condition by its gender reversal. The heroine is resourceful, loyal, and powerful. Yet she is unhinged by the emotional manipulation of her weaker partner, in this case a man who still, because of social convention, manages to be more powerful. In her own words: "We women are the most wretched race. Who indeed first must purchase a husband with excess of money, and receive him a lord of our persons and if with us carefully performing these things a husband shall dwell not imposing on us a yoke with severity, enviable is our life; if not, to die is better."
These words were written more than 2,000 years ago and resonate today. Such exploration of human imperfection and frailty, including the ageless travails of the weaker sex, are necessary functions of art. They're desperately needed to get the society out of its ignorance and seeming aversion to emotional complexity.
The play Carnival Medea is a good example of the perversion of that function. In it, subtlety, details and possibilities of moral reasoning are lost. Medea has an answer for those who would seek to blame victims of crime: "whatever man being unjust, is deeply skilled in argument, merits the severest punishment. For vaunting that with his tongue he can well gloze over injustice, he dares to work deceit, but he is not over wise." Unfortunately, no one looking at this play would have any sense it plumbs these depths.
Continues on page A26
Medea offers an insight into the condition by its gender reversal. The heroine is resourceful, loyal, and powerful. Yet she is unhinged by the emotional manipulation of her weaker partner, in this case a man who still, because of social convention, manages to be more powerful.
