Ideal Cast

The play has three characters: Medea, the Nurse and Jason. From the first time I read the play I knew that Jason wouldn't  be a live presence of the world of my staging. So I will go on presenting my ideal cast for the Nurse and Medea.

Nurse

In my opinion, such characters have a masculine quality to them or I could say a rough femininity. Nurses in the ancient Greek world were women slaves who were loyal and trustworthy to their masters. They were either born in slavery or they were war trophies - Eurycleia, the nurse of Odysseus, was one. It was a lifetime relationship. In these houses – rich and royal – the wives and mothers wouldn’t take care of their children’s basic needs – feeding, cleaning, sleeping etc. – so it was the nurse’s duty to be in a way a second mother (παραμάνα – paramana) and provide for the young ones. Their destiny had two possible outcomes, if they would take care of a boy then they would stay with it for the rest of their lives, in the same household – since the boy would take over the kingdom – and they would continue taking care of the next generation. Now, if they would take care of a girl then they would follow that girl to her new house when she would get married and they would continue caring of the next generation – exactly what the nurse in the Medea story did.

I think of the Nurse as a rather masculine character because these women were robbed of any socio-feminine characteristics and were left with their basic natural instinct, the maternal. Also their feminine appearance was covered so that they wouldn’t provoke and in order to protect themselves from the males of the household. Their social status didn’t allow them for any beautification and forced them to “marry” the family they were serving – they wouldn’t get married or have children of their own.

So, ideally I would like to have a masculine woman with rough facial characteristics and a big body, somebody that would be able to give a butch lesbian vibe or a man with an androgynous appearance with soft neutral characteristics and a rough voice, something like Boy George or David Bowie – his ‘70s version.

Medea

Woman, daughter, sister, mother, lover, witch, mad, barbarian, murderess. All these qualities/identities are part of the Medea’s myth. All these are weaved and inseparable and I choose to focus on the barbarian aspect of Medea. In Medeamaterial she uses this characterization for herself a number of times. She is the other woman, who comes from a strange land where customs, traditions, culture and language are different. She looks different, she dresses different, she reacts and responds differently. Medea is a barbaric witch who has betrayed her family to help her lover Jason, while taking a road of no return. There is a version on the etymology of Medea’s name, that it’s rendered from the verb μέδομαι which has two meanings, both connected to thought and wit. The first meaning is to provide for, think on, be mindful of, bethink one of and the second is to plan, contrive, devise something for one. Therefore, often, she is referred as the "thinking woman".

And now she discovers that Jason, the man to whom she swore eternal loyalty wants another woman, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth and a "real Greek”. Characters like the "foreign" Medea posses a remarkable female wisdom, and a heroic quality in accordance to the standards of male heroism and vengeance, completely in contrast to the context of female presence in classical Greece, where the woman is limited to her house, without special presence or rhetorical possibilities.

I am looking for an actress with a “strange” atypical beauty, with a physical characteristic that makes her single out from the mass. Maybe she is very tall, or her hair is fire red or her nose is particular, or she is of a different race. The certain thing is I want an actress whose mother tongue isn’t English, I want her to have an accent in her speech. 

Red is a recurrent color in the myth of Medea. Passion, love, magic, survival, anger, life, death, murder, blood.