Monday, Nov. 03, 1947

Half-New Play in Manhattan

Medea (freely adapted from the Greek of Euripides by Robinson Jeffers; produced by Robert Whitehead & Oliver Rea) seemed to many first-nighters last week what it seemed to Macaulay a hundred years ago--Euripides' greatest play. To be sure, Euripides didn't have much to do with last week's enthusiasm. More in the limelight was Poet Robinson Jeffers for his quite free, sometimes florid, but generally effective adaptation. Still more in the limelight was John Gielgud for his skillful staging (though not for his performance as Jason). Most in the limelight was Judith Anderson for her really tremendous performance in the title role.

There are few greater roles--or grislier ones. In Medea, the wife whom Jason has ignominiously deserted in order to make a more advantageous marriage, are mingled all a woman's hate, an Asiatic princess' stung pride, a sorceress' cunning, a barbarian's violence.

She who once lived, daring anything, only to bring Jason pleasure, lives now, fearing nothing, only to give him pain. Just for the bitter anguish it will cause him, she can bring herself to murder their children.

Appalling and terrible, Medea is somehow yet understandable and real--her emotions less hidden in the mists of the past than an Oedipus' or an Antigone's. And with a temerity as notable as her talent, Actress Anderson (Macbeth, The Three Sisters) brought those emotions spectacularly out into the open. She flung aside both classic control and realistic restraint. She played Medea half in the grand manner, half in the Grand Guignol manner; she used every wile of body and face, every art of voice and gesture, to produce something possibly mixed or impure--but definitely, undeniably overwhelming.

Poet Jeffers made his translation, "getting freer as it went," of Euripides' drama about five years ago at the urging of Actress Anderson and especially for her. He dedicated his work to her, though he had seen her act only once--in a California presentation of his Greekish Tower Beyond Tragedy. The whacking Broadway success of Medea has made up to Jeffers the recent Broadway failure of a dramatization of his poem, Dear Judas (TIME, Oct. 20). The 60-year-old poet thinks now that he might even try writing an original play "if I knew what to write about."

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