Mention the word ‘Tragedy’, and many would think about endless tears with an Everest equivalent of tissue paper. While this may apply for the myriads of Korean Dramas, Greek Tragedy evokes a different set of emotions altogether. (No tissues required).

For us to understand this, we must first look into the original purpose of these tragedies. As the wise Aristotle penned down hundreds of years ago in the Poetics, the purpose of a tragedy is ‘an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.’

What Aristotle meant to say is that a tragedy is engineered to stir emotions of pity and fear within us, and through the course of the tragedy, allow us to be released from these emotions, known as catharsis. Looked in the modern light, Greek Tragedies served as a kind of psychiatric function for the ancient Greeks before any of those pendulum-waving fellows emerged.

The main work cut out for those talented didaskaloi (playwrights) was to stir emotions of fear and pity in their audience, a combination not frequently found these days. How did they do it? Mainly through these three ingredients: The Tragic Hero, The Tragic Deed and the participants in those deeds.

Now, being the selfish humans we are, it is impossible to feel pity and fear for another, unless they are somehow connected to us. If a really evil guy gets his desserts, we will all be cheering our heads off. If an absolute angel of a person gets desserts (not the food) he did not deserve, we would feel irritated, angry and call the hapless writer an utter idiot and annoyance. Thus, those didaskaloi created characters that were neither good nor bad, but flawed, whose misfortune was brought about by their error in judgement. These heroes represented the average man, just like us, and if they could suffer such punishments for a simple mistake they made, then we might very well face that too.

To give the whole tragedy an extra oomph, just in case the audience had a heart made of the hardest of stone and never an ounce of pity in their lives, those didaskaloi made sure that the mistakes their heroes made involved their family members. Mothers, Fathers, Kids. You name it, they had it.

Oh right, you the cynical reader say. What kind of fate could they possibly suffer eh? The misfortunes they suffered ran the gamut from sleeping with your mother and bearing children with her, to killing your own offspring.

So, in watching Medea, you are in for a great treat. Not only are you going to be exceedingly paranoid about your banal but healthy life, you will also be dishing out sympathy as you have never before.

The Greek Tragedies stand out as a class of their own.

Euripides (480BC-406BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens. His first play was produced when he was about 30, and he went on to write 92 plays altogether, of which 19 survive. For over 2000 years he was the best known, most admired and most influential of all Greek dramatists. Surviving titles suggest that he favoured stories with women protagonists; since Greek playwrights often acted in their own plays, this in turn suggests that he may have been expert in travesty acting, a skill as highly regarded in ancient Greek theatre as it still is, for example, in the Japanese Noh tradition.

If his surviving plays are good evidence, Euripides was less interested in ‘verbal music’ than were either Aeschylus or Sophocles. His language is seldom ‘sublime’; lines justify themselves by their place in the dramatic logic, by what they contribute to the flow of ideas and confrontations. He proceeds not with the mellifluous majesty of an Aeschylus or the solemn moral grandeur of a Sophocles, but by a torrent of dialectic, by abrupt turns and clashes of character, by visual and conceptual coup de theatre. He is outstanding at showing characters in states of emotional and psychological stress, and he manipulates each situation, each myth, to do so.

Euripides’ combination of intensity and philosophical insight is often disconcerting; his revisionist approach to the ancient myths and skeptical attitudes both to the Olympiad gods and to he political orthodoxies of Periclean Athens reflect the ‘advanced’ thinking of his time as well as, no doubt, personal insight. His high reputation came largely after his death. In his lifetime his plays seldom won first prizes; at the height of his career he was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for impiety, and even in his eighties, controversial and unregenerate to the last, he was forced to flee from ‘democratic’ Athens to monarchical Macedonia.

The translation we are using for our production is more or less similar to the Euripides’ play performed in September and October 1992 at the Almedia Theatre, Islington, under the direction of Jonathan Kent. After scouring through various translations we decided to base our production largely on this translation, because the language, true to Euripides, is the most accessible for us, without being divested of its rich imagery. Some of the cuts, like the references to touching beard and knees in the procedure of supplication, have been restored in this production as an important visual motif.

Jason, the son of Aeson and the rightful heir to the throne of Iolchos, had no such princely luck – in a bitter feud, his father was overthrown by his half-uncle Pelias. Still clutching at the bloodstained crown, Pelias decreed that all of Aeson’s descendants be executed, and the infant Jason only escaped with his life by seeking refuge in the house of Cheiron the centaur. Pelias spared no oracle in hunting down the rightful king, and was told that he would appear at the palace clad in one sandal. Many years later, when the youmg Jason stepped into Pelias’ court, as if fresh from the oracle’s prophecy, Pelias sent him on a perilous journey to obtain the Golden Fleece, with hopes that he would perish in the attempt.

Jason assembled the greatest heroes in Greece and set sail on the Argo, a massive warship with a magical prow, which spoke and rendered prophecies. Only the strongest men could ward off the claws of the harpies, only the purest of hearts could guard against the wild beauty of the women of Lemnos, but it was the speed and sturdiness of the Argo that kept the heroes from certain death between the pincer-like Clashing Rocks, where not even a bird could fly past. Battle-torn, Jason and the Argonauts arrived at barbarian land of Colchis.

Aeetes, the King of Colchis, decreed that Jason would only be given the Golden Fleece if he completed three tasks, while his daughter Medea looked on from the curtains of royal court. The young sorceress, though cunning, could not shield her heart from the enchantments of love, and her infatuation with the stranger blazed more wildly than her loyalty to the throne. With her love and aid, Jason completed his three tasks unscathed, finally slaying the Sleepless Dragon to claim his prize. Aeetes never intended for Jason to succeed, and upon hearing that Jason and Medea had fled with the Fleece, he gave chase. Medea knew that her father’s ships were swifter than theirs – to distract him, she killed her brother Apsyrtus and cast pieces of his body into the sea, compelling Aeetes to stop and gather. Medea and Jason returned to Iolchos, a blood-red sea in their wake.

The fallen lovers were plagued by hardship on their journey back. Armed with Medea’s destructive passion, Jason escaped the deathly songs of the Sirens, and the onslaught of the bronze giant Talos, only to face Pelias’ wrath, for the aging king did not plan to relinquish his throne. Once again, Medea’s enemies were caught in her carefully embroidered web. Medea boiled an old ram in a magic potion in front of Pelias’ daughters, drawing up from the broth a young lamb. Pelias’ daughters, wanting to revive their dying father, likewise boiled him in a cauldron, but Medea had switched the potion with water, constructing Pelias’ excruciating end. The two sinners were banished to Corinth, where the curtains of Euripides’s tale rise.