Medea/Medea - The Gate Theatre.

Some performances need to be performances. This performance needed to be a lecture. Held in 1980. So painfully old fashioned (and yet so clearly yearning to be "cutting edge"), this deep well of pretension may be a misunderstood piece of satire. If that is the case, it was entirely lost in the rendition. Everything is a symbol for Dylan Tighe, the director. This might be vaguely interesting except that it is all flagged, pointed out to us again and again. Tighe makes himself a presence at the edges of this interminable play, appearing as a meta-theatrical figure to quote Roland Barthes (and himself) or make some pseudo-profound statement about myths or the nature of "drama", whatever that is. This director-ex-machina inclusion is both pretentious and unnecessary - an unforgivable combination in performance.

What frustrates so terribly is how textual it all is. It is not text used as evocation of something beyond the word itself, rather it reduces words to mere signifiers dispossessed of any greater meaning. Which is exactly what this show was trying to do. And, it must be said, it achieved its goals of exploring structure and symbols, but revealed that that exploration is, essentially, nonsense.

Barthes has some very stimulating things to say about myths and language, about symbols and cultural codes. The fact is he said it in Mythologies and said it better than this performance ever could. If one wanted to find out about Barthes ideas one would be better set to read his writings rather than engage with these banal reflections on how we look at performance.

That goal, to make the audience re-view theatre and performance, has been done, better and more intelligently, by Brecht and many others, generations ago. I do not think that people see theatre in the way Tighe imagines they do. Brecht was pushing against a theatrical context that valued melodrama and stock characters and could (attempt to) demonstrate that this influenced the way we saw people in society. We are not in such a context anymore. We possess a more critical view of cultural representations and a nuanced understanding of how normative behaviours are passed to us (well, I hope we do). And so to challenge the way people look at theatre is not an action worth taking. To undermine how people see - anything, everything - is perhaps worth the effort, but this work never ventures into this more subtle and tricky waters..

The single saving grace of it all was the performance by the children. They were the only people doing things without making it seem as though they believed they were doing something profound.

Tighe claims that drama is created in structure. It would appear he spent 76 minutes proving it is not. Performance should create and present experiences and if he had moved on in his critical thinking for beginners book from deconstructionism to phenomenology, he might have been on to something. At the minute this feels like student performance (no offence to students) in the sense that it has identifiable themes that can be discussed in essays and assessed in end-of-term performances. This is not what performance for audiences is about.

There is, for all the bile I generated during the course of this performance, the core of a good piece of work. Take out all text that can be understood, take out the heavy handed symbolism of flags and dolls and hobby horses and gun shots, use the gauze in front of the stage properly, enjoy the jokes that are there, stop thinking that you are saying something profound and, as always, hire a dramaturg. This show does provoke and I would not be surprised if the negative reactions they have been getting is not in some way pleasing, but the reaction is not because we fail to understand some underlying profundity, but rather because we understand all too easily that there is little more here than could be found in another form, said better.

- James Grogan