Another Country. "Despoiled Shore", "Medeamaterial" and "Landscape with Argonauts". The Border Project [review]

Abstract

The Border Project is a new company committed, you might say, to pushing the boundaries. And with their first venture, based on the texts of German writer Heiner Muller, they have taken on the themes of exile, persecution and betrayal. Muller uses the story of Medea, the sorceress who betrays her father and slaughters her brother in order to help her lover Jason steal the Golden Fleece. The part of the narrative he focuses on most, though, is the episode Euripides uses for his disturbing tragedy where, after settling in Corinth, Jason abandons Medea to marry the daughter of the King Creon and, in revenge, Medea murders their two young sons and escapes to Athens. Not since Benedict Andrews’ ventures with Koltes and the "Ur Faust" or, more recently, Brink’s excellent "Quartet" has anyone taken on the vocabulary of experimental European theatre. But maybe these days there are other styles than over-wrought declamation. Something closer to the wit and comedy that is energetically ubiquitous in popular culture.