The mother of all tragedies

By Jo Roberts
May 13, 2005
Justine Saunders as the chorus with (background) Margaret Harvey as Medea and Aaron Pedersen as Jason.

Photo: Heidi Lohr

Wesley Enoch updates the tragic Greek tale of Medea to contemporary Australia.

Wesley Enoch was, by his own description, a "very violent, very nasty child". With a turbulent home life, the young Aboriginal boy was threatening to follow in his father's footsteps. By the age of 12, Wesley had been expelled from three schools, earning one expulsion for hurling a desk at a teacher.

Imagine if Enoch was the child of the title character in his latest play. He most likely would not have lived to tell the tale.

Black Medea is Enoch's latest theatrical excursion, an indigenous appropriation of Euripides' classic Greek myth of Medea, the witch-woman who takes the ultimate revenge against her husband Jason by killing their son.

The play has just finished a successful season at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre, and opens in Melbourne this weekend at the Malthouse Theatre.

Enoch is happy to be back in Melbourne at the Fitzroy home he has seen little of since moving into in February. He suggests we sit on the porch to enjoy the sun. There, he talks a lot, and laughs often, his own sunny disposition seemingly at odds with the child he describes - the child who overcame his violent tendencies by becoming involved in theatre.

"For me, the killing of that child at the end of the play is a metaphoric killing of the child, the person, I could have been," says Enoch. But people took a chance on me, and helped me through, and theatre was the thing that changed my life."

Euripides wrote his Medea 2500 years ago, but in Enoch's re-interpretation, the story is transplanted into a modern-day Aboriginal family racked by violence and alcohol. Enoch first wrote and directed Black Medea in 2000 as a work in progress, while a resident director at the Sydney Theatre Company. It then "sat in the cupboard" until this year. "I'd wanted to do it again, because I thought the first time around, I'd got certain things to work, but other things I still needed to do some time on, but never got around to it," says Enoch, who had been kept busy with numerous other projects (including the powerful Jane Harrison play, Stolen, which has been restaged annually since its 1998 debut). "Then Michael Kantor, Malthouse's artistic director, said 'Let's do it'. It went from there."

It's not just the telling of Euripides' tale, it's the telling of an indigenous experience."

Enoch has substantially reworked Black Medea from its 2000 version, but the story remains the same. In Euripides' Medea, the title character is an evil, vengeful woman. Enoch's Medea (played by Margaret Harvey) is a more emotionally complex creature, one that the audience can easily empathise with, thanks to the reinvention of her husband, Jason (played by Aaron Pedersen), from Euripides' abandoning bigamist to a violent alcoholic caught between white and traditional culture. Still, Medea's climactic action of infanticide is present in both versions, and loses none of its horror in Enoch's version, in which the cycle of violence ends when the child is spared his feared destiny.

"The Aboriginality of that character is really important for me - it's not just the telling of Euripides' tale, it's actually the telling of an indigenous experience. I don't think any Aboriginal family has ever been untouched by those kinds of issues," says Enoch, who speaks freely speaking about his own father's once-abusive ways.

"Alcoholism was part of it, all of those kinds of things," he says of his childhood. "What's interesting is how much that kind of stuff is not talked about; it's almost a sense of the story we want to tell, the story Aboriginal people want to tell non-Aboriginal is one of 'we're good, we're strong, we survived'.

"But when you think about black on black issues, when you think about domestic violence, incest, all the other nasty things that can be there as well . . . that kind of comes to the fore. You want to see the reasons why things happen, so let's talk about it. It's time to discuss things in an open way. And to say sure, that's what happened, but that doesn't mean it has to happen to the next generation or the next."

Ironically, as we sit and talk about the impact of alcohol and violence on indigenous communities, a recycling bin filled with empty beer bottles sits on the front porch. A cardboard beer box sitting next to it brims with more empties. "Make sure it's not in the photograph," laughs Enoch. Yet in his 35 years, Enoch has never drunk alcohol - even though his friends who came to his housewarming party on the weekend clearly do.

"There were no positive role models with alcohol in my family, so why would you start?," he says of his decision not to drink.

Enoch's father is now 57 and has mellowed considerably. "Watching my father turn from, you know, well, not a great father to a fantastic grandfather, it's helped heal a lot of those wounds," says Enoch. "Watching him learn those lessons and apply them now, it's great."

Enoch relished the chance to move away from the more naturalistic nature of most indigenous theatre by appropriating the classic Greek tale of Medea to create a work rich in poetry, yet uncompromising in impact - all in 55 minutes.

"I remember being fascinated by a lot of those Greek stories . . . and Medea always fascinated me. This woman is able to suppress that maternal urge and kill her child, either in revenge or, in our case, addressing a sense of cycle of violence . . . At the end of the show you don't think she is any less evil, but perhaps you see some other circumstances and so your sympathies are pushed and pulled around."

So powerful are the audiences' emotional shifts, one of the young Sydney cast members (the role of the boy is shared by two actors) even questioned the blurred lines between good and evil. "One of the boys (in the production) from Sydney asked me, 'Which one is good and which one is bad?'," says Enoch. "I said 'I don't know, Clive, you tell me'. And he says 'Well, Jason starts bad and Medea starts good, but then Medea ends bad and Jason ends good'. And you kind of think, in a simplistic way, that's what good drama is about, when you see characters journeying and you understand a little bit more about where they come from. It's more complex than black and white, so to speak."

Black Medea previews tonight and opens tomorrow at the CUB Malthouse, Sturt Street, Southbank. Until June 5. Book on 9685 5111.


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