Medea / Mothers' Clothes

Medea – a character from Greek Mythology. She helps Jason get the Golden Fleece and joins him on the way back to Greece . She is a barbarian (bar-bar: incomprehensible language), a foreigner, not Greek. She and Jason marry and have 2 boys. In 10 years time Jason decides to marry the king's daughter and Medea (according to Euripides) takes revenge on Jason by killing their two boys.

All play quotes are taken from Euripides. Medea (translated by John Davie). London : Penguin Books, 2003. (first edition 1996).

Monologue 1:

MEDEA:

(…)

Of all creatures that have life and reason we women are
the most miserable of specimens! In the first place, at great
expense we must buy a husband, taking a master to play the
tyrant with our bodies (this is an injustice that crowns the
other one). And here lies the crucial issue for us, whether we
get a good man or a bad. For divorce brings disgrace on a
woman and in the interval she cannot refuse her husband.
Once she finds herself among customs and laws that are
unfamiliar, a woman must turn prophet to know what sort
of man she will be dealing with as husband – not information
gained at home. Now if we manage this task successfully and
share our home with a husband who finds marriage a yoke
he bears with ease, our lives are to be envied. But if not, we'd
be better off dead.

When a man becomes dissatisfied with married life, he goes
outdoors and finds relief for his frustrations. But we are bound
to love one partner and look no further. They say we live
sheltered lives in the home, free from danger, while they wield
their spears in battle – what fools they are! I would rather
face the enemy three times over than bear a child once.

However, we are not in the same position, you and I. You
have your city here and the homes where your fathers have
lived; you enjoy life's pleasures and the companionship of
those you love. But what of me? Abandoned, homeless, I am
a cruel husband's plaything, the plunder he brought back
from a foreign land, with no mother to turn to, no brother or
kinsman to rescue me from this sea of troubles and give me
shelter. And so there is one small kindness I ask of you, if I
devise some ways and means of making my husband pay
for this suffering of mine: your silence. Women are timid
creatures for the most part, cowards when it comes to fighting
and at the sight of steel; but wrong a woman in love and
nothing on earth has a heart more murderous.

Medea – Mothers – Me

Medea symbolizes the Anti-Mother archetype. She transgresses from mother to anti-mother through the ultimate rebellious act of murdering her children. She challenges the patriarchal system. However she is not a woman, but Woman as sign - a construct of a male-dominated theatre tradition, invented by patriarchy for patriarchy to teach patriarchy a lesson.

Medea/Mothers' Clothes project is about deconstructing Medea, contemporary representations of maternity and ultimately Mother as Archetype: the burden on mothers as mater natura and mater spiritualis – totality of life (Jung).

Becoming a mother has forced me into a conscious playing of the Mother role. New to Liverpool , an outsider, a ‘foreigner', I socialised with other mothers in the area. We all became a group in which it was difficult to assert our identity as individuals. Our identity was shared: we were ‘mother'. I needed to rebel – to claim an identity, a voice other than the maternal. I offer the ‘voice' of this performance to the mothers who participated in the project.