18/09/18 Medea

In our context lesson we watched a video on Greek tragedy from the National Theatre website. Tragedy shows unflinching pain and suffering of the human race. It shows the flawed world of suffering and misery caused by us. Tragedies confront shared feelings such as death and grief. They create catharsis, cleansing, as the audience feel pity and fear for the characters. Having these feelings and in some cases shedding tears means the ending purges you of these bad emotions resulting in a ‘cleansing’.  Aristotle worked out the ‘formula’ of Greek tragedy, he said that the heroes must be good but must be relatable and make mistakes. They must have ‘Hamartia’ which means the error of judgement. The characters may think they are doing the right thing but in reality they are making the situation worse. Greek tragedy is stylised and always starts with a prologue, followed by the chorus performing an introductory ode. The sun is used as a metaphor for death a lot in Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy has had a massive impact on entertainment throughout history. A recent example of this is soap operas, dramatic events within a community. They even share some of the same themes as the original Greek tragedies such as: death, fighting and cheating.

At the beginning of this afternoon’s lesson we were split into our groups for Medea. My group included Daniella, Tia, Chloe, and Harry. We were given the first paragraph of the Medea extract and divided the lines between us. The first three lines ‘Come over here! Hurry up! Move yourself!’ we decided to say in unison to start the scene off high energy. We all then gather centre stage at different levels to make it interesting for the audience. Towards the end of our extract we created a sound scape repeating and overlapping the lines: ‘You talk to her. You’re the oldest; you know her best.’ Getting louder until Harry cuts in with ‘Stop her being so stupid!’