It's important not to think of Radical Feminism as a period which lived and died in the 1960-80's - and this was indeed the time when the Women's Liberation Movement, backed by a wave of radical intellectualism and activism, invaded the workplace, the home, and the family unit. This era had its predecessors (and its successors). Ask Emma Goldman. Ask Shakespeare. Ask Elizabeth I. Arguably, radical feminism has its beginnings back when the pen hit the paper of the first Christian bible when Eve was "cast from the rib" of Adam, (perhaps one of literature's initial oppressive acts). The roles women have played, often under duress as the second-wave movement pointed out, have been questioned again and again in the theatre - mostly by men, and mostly in a way that has a limit to its radical power.
For a text that's almost 2500 years old, Medea, a story in which a mother murders her children, has a surprising amount of radical potential. It has always struck me as a text which takes a impossible position, "I murder my children", and spends the rest of its pages failing to justify it. In doing so, two of humanism's great ideals - the right to emancipation and right to life - are split directly down the middle. Is Medea's an action of liberation - a sort of absurd protest? A violent rejection of the child-bearer role? Or another example of human failure, a result of the irresolvable crisis of a woman torn between her supposed obligations and her freedom?
Right from the opening, the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus production places Medea in the interrogation chair and proceeds to unashamedly take her apart. The stage space is a wall divided in two - on the top level is Medea, free to roam above us, yet undeniably trapped, while all other characters mill about on the ground floor. The effect is a kind of pedestal - clearly we know who is the focus here, and it's not long before Medea (a tremendous shape-shifting performance by Constanze Becker) is pressured into the full range of emotions and roles - sliding from temptress to hag, motherhood to the juvenile. In fact it is Medea's sheer transformativity that seems her defining trait - and any reader of feminist literature will tell you, when we're talking about power, 'changeability' can go either way (the figure of the Femme Fatale springs to mind as an example of the transformativity of women being potentially disempowering, for example).
For a text that's almost 2500 years old, Medea, a story in which a mother murders her children, has a surprising amount of radical potential. It has always struck me as a text which takes a impossible position, "I murder my children", and spends the rest of its pages failing to justify it. In doing so, two of humanism's great ideals - the right to emancipation and right to life - are split directly down the middle. Is Medea's an action of liberation - a sort of absurd protest? A violent rejection of the child-bearer role? Or another example of human failure, a result of the irresolvable crisis of a woman torn between her supposed obligations and her freedom?
Right from the opening, the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus production places Medea in the interrogation chair and proceeds to unashamedly take her apart. The stage space is a wall divided in two - on the top level is Medea, free to roam above us, yet undeniably trapped, while all other characters mill about on the ground floor. The effect is a kind of pedestal - clearly we know who is the focus here, and it's not long before Medea (a tremendous shape-shifting performance by Constanze Becker) is pressured into the full range of emotions and roles - sliding from temptress to hag, motherhood to the juvenile. In fact it is Medea's sheer transformativity that seems her defining trait - and any reader of feminist literature will tell you, when we're talking about power, 'changeability' can go either way (the figure of the Femme Fatale springs to mind as an example of the transformativity of women being potentially disempowering, for example).
