Medea

ANCIENTS STILL SPEAKING The play opens with Medea and Jason (of the golden fleece fame) living with their three children in the kingdom of Corinth. Things begin to go wrong when Medea, played by Maureen Beattie, learns of Jason's engagement to Princess Glauke of Corinth, daughter of King Kreon. She curses the royal family in public and is banished from the kingdom, only to be granted one day's grace to bid farewell to her family. The action comes to a head when Medea meets Princess Glauke and in a fit of towering rage, concocts a brutal and bloody plan of revenge. MEDEA "I HAD to see Liz Lochhead's Medea, but once wasn't enough. I went twice and will not forget Maureen Beattie's breathtaking performance in a hurry" - Toyah Wilcox MAUREEN'S ROLE IN MEDEA MANY actresses would regard the opportunity to play Medea as a notable landmark in their career, and might be excused a little pretension about it. Not so Maureen Beattie, for whom refreshing down-to-earthness appears to be second nature. She may be a scion of one of Scotland's premier showbiz families - and her conversation is peppered with references to father Johnny, the veteran comic, and sister Louise, currently in Emmerdale - but you get the impression it is also an environment that would be unlikely to tolerate the donning of airs and graces. "I love variety and I've been lucky enough to survive on my earnings as a turn," she says. "It's not that I won't die happy if I don't do Cleopatra." Maureen, who would surely make a very fine Egyptian queen but is probably still best, known for her role in BBC TV's Casualty, can certainly point to an unusual breadth of work. She has been round the world with a Royal National Theatre production of Othello, been the villainess in a recent Taggart, has appeared alongside Robson Green in Scottish Television's The Last Musketeer in 2000 and graced the stage as the Wicked Witch in the Glasgow King's panto. Maureen claims, somewhat unbelievably, that Theatre Babel director Graham McLaren cast her although he did not see her out of her witch's makeup until the first day of rehearsal. Babel has not yet been able to contract actors for the tour but the current company - including Molly Innes (Electra), Neil McKinven (Oedipus), Dawn Steele, John Kazek, and Finlay Welsh as well as Beattie - is keen to continue, says McLaren. "Liz was the hook that got me in," says Maureen of Lochhead. "She's a mate and I'm a great admirer of her work. She is such a robust writer, very ballsy, and this script is typical in that it's immediate and accessible. It's got great rhythms without being overly poetic." The three scripts, she says, are utterly different but McLaren say he has been surprised by how they work together. He says that he has found it less daunting to think of the four hours' stage time as equivalent to one long Shakespeare, but while Katie Mitchell had months to hone her Oresteia for the Royal National Theatre, Babel's Greeks has had the characteristic few weeks. Medea is unfazed. "It's very sharpening to the mind to have to get on with it," says Maureen. Her last tilt at the classics involved even less rehearsal, when she was a third-year student at the RSAMD and cast as Jocasta in Seneca's Oedipus (as translated by Ted Hughes). After five days' work, parents dutifully arrived to see the fruits of their offsprings' labours. Maureen recalls that her mother confessed to having been bored rigid. Perhaps in a bid to avoid tedium, her final year's nod towards the origins of the dramatic arts was an original musical based on the story of King Midas, called The Midas Touch. "Students usually think that everything they do is wonderful, but even we knew it was dire," she says. EVENING NEWS 07/08/00 The end result is thrilling as the rhythm of a catalogue of wishesand regrets builds to a crashing climax. Maureen Beattie is a magnetic Medea. Her body radiates hatred and she shivers with fury. The script moves smoothly from waves of luxurious lyricism to curt colloquialism. The entire cast is perfect. THE SCOTSMAN 07/08/00 The stunning chorus of tough-talking Corinthian women pulled off a rare feat of infusing their speaking with empowered grit. Sassy, sussed and straight-talking Maureen Beattie rages with convincing venom. The gripping portrayal keeps all eyes pinned on her. Beattie's performance has tremendous visceral power and sexual authority.