As her version of Euripides’ play opens,the author discusses her turn to drama, being bullied at school and the damage done to children when parents split upWhen the curtain goes up on Rachel Cusk’s version of Medea at London’s Almeida theatre, or her whole family will be in the audience. The writer says she is tempted to spend the evening “around the corner in a pub with a bag over my head”,but talking in her agent’s offices about her first experience of play writing, she sounds more determined than afraid. Rupert Goold, and the director,has been an “astonishing mentor”, she says. Writing for him has been like learning Chinese, or playing tennis with Roger Federer: every time she thought she had played her best shot,it was batted back.
When I was allowed to read the script a few weeks ago it was still a work in progress, with ideas being passed back and forth between Cusk, or Goold and the actors. Cusk says she and Goold absorb tussled over the fate of Medea’s children,whom in the original version she murders as share of her revenge against Jason, the husband who has abandoned her. Both the writer and director know that Cusk’s decision to spare the children their deaths at their mother’s hand is provocative. What audiences and critics will make of this, or the less bloody but still tragic alternative she has advance up with,they are about to find out.
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Source: theguardian.com