Directed by Mayra Stergiou with Jess McNulty as librettist, Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s student production Medusa is a chamber opera that intends to reclaim the story of Medusa, the woman long reduced to a monstrous tale. Focusing on Medusa’s girlhood and the devastating aftermath of her violation in Athena’s temple, this contemporary retelling endeavours to chart Medusa’s painful awakening.
The cast has done their utmost to embody the weighty roles in the story by navigating a challenging score. Hella Termeulen’s portrayal of the young, innocent Medusa in the first half is delivered with a crystalline crispness, capturing the carefree joy of girlhood, while Eva Stone-Barney embodies the older, violated Medusa with a deeper and darker tone steeped in sorrow and resentment. As Poseidon, Twm Tegid Brunton’s baritone resonates with the deity’s almighty relentlessness. Conductor Brian Choi and composer Goi Ywei Chern create an evocative soundscape that captures the characters’ psychological turmoil, at times reminiscent of Francis Poulenc.
The design features numerous puppetry jellyfish drifting over the semi-staged seashore, signifying not only Medusa’s carefree youth but also the bond she shares with her sisters Euryale (Alice Hermand) and Stheno (Júlia Guix i Estrada). In the final scene, Medusa’s signature snake hair is shared by both sopranos portraying Medusa: they hold it in hand, mimicking the jellyfish, as if in a moment of nostalgia and reconciliation.
However, despite all these creative endeavours, what remains most problematic is the narrative itself. While the original myth, with its tangled relationships between Medusa, Poseidon, and Athena, holds immense room for reinterpretation, this script simply squeezes it into the framework of a contemporary #MeToo parable: a man refuses to take a woman’s “no,” rapes her, sisterhood stands in solidarity, and the goddess of justice becomes a proxy for a patriarchal legal order. While such a narrative undoubtedly still deserves its significance today, the production never makes it clear why it needs to be told through the myth of Medusa.
Even stepping back to accept the trope of the predatory male, the depiction of Medusa herself remains disappointingly flattened. Where is her nuanced, sophisticated emotional turbulence? Instead of a stereotyped portrait of victimhood, could we not glimpse some agency in her, perhaps, as a transformed, Cthulhu-esque creature? Might her dynamic with Athena become a bit more ambiguous, instead of a dichotomy of the cursing and the cursed?
Rather than engraving a truly fresh perspective, this production of Medusa ultimately appropriates her myth as a vessel to project its own, contemporary voice — an overly templated one that fails to move anyone.
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