“I can’t believe that this dream has finally come true!” said the excited actress Victoria Abril on Wednesday night to a group of journalists in the peristyle garden of the Roman theatre in Mérida, just behind the ancient stage. She had just finished the premiere of Medusa, which marked her return to the Spanish stage after 45 years devoted to film and television, playing no less than one of the great classical myths: the monstrous woman with snake hair and a petrifying gaze. In recent years, the actress has starred in a few theatre productions in France, where she has lived since the 1980s, but nothing since then in Spain. So the expectation was great: many of the three thousand spectators who packed the cavern of the historic coliseum interrupted the action to greet her with applause in her first scene.
But Medusa This is not the kind of show we would have liked to see one of the best Spanish actresses of her generation perform in the flesh. There is little to find fault with in this work conceived, written and directed by José María del Castillo: a text with little literary value, a bombastic staging that lacks imagination, performances full of clichés and a farcical tone that makes any connection with the Greco-Latin mythical universe impossible.
On paper, the proposal is attractive: a reinterpretation of the myth of Medusa, a symbol of the most clichéd “female evil” but also an emblem of empowerment in the face of violence and abuse by men, told from the point of view of the character herself. Based on different versions of the rhapsodists of Antiquity, mainly the one formulated by Ovid in The metamorphoses, Del Castillo gives voice to Medusa to reverse her stigma and present her as a victim of “fear of the different, the cult of appearance and induced social thinking,” as explained in the playbill. To do so, she brings the myth down to earth, humanizes it and confronts it with the stratospheric world of megalomaniacal heroes and gods who subjugate humans in a capricious manner.
The idea is good, but it is executed in such a parodic way and the text is so poor that the myth is stripped of its poetic quality. The first scene is illustrative: after a very long choreographic sequence of hyper-muscled warriors led by Perseus (the hero who cut off Medusa’s head) followed by a musical number starring singer Ruth Lorenzo with a Eurovision-style pyrotechnic aesthetic, Victoria Abril enters the scene, mocking the prevailing testosterone and explaining to the audience that she is going to tell them her true story. The actress wins over the audience, of course, she has the naturalness and experience to devour the stage by herself, even one as large as Mérida’s, but the tone of a comic monologist that she adopts (imposed by the text) strips the myth of its tragic aura.
This is what the whole show will be like. Musical numbers, dance, monologues and dialogues loaded with psychological theories (attachment, grief in all its phases, transgenerational drama, family and cultural mandates, consent), all wrapped in a static set with large figures of golden snakes and a large oracle in the background with video projections, follow one another in the recreation of the story of Medusa: she was a beautiful, innocent young woman (played by Elisabet Biosca) until she was raped by the god Poseidon (Peter James), the jealous goddess Athena (Mariola Fuentes) turns her into a monster and Perseus cuts off her head (Adrián Lastra). Each character, moreover, is in a different tone. Athena is an overacting goddess and Perseus is pure drama. In Medusa’s final monologue, where she claims the freedom to be and have different opinions, it seems that what is speaking is not so much the character herself, but rather that Victoria Abril, who has never minced words and in recent years has gotten herself into a few media hot spots with controversial statements about the pandemic or sexual abuse.
During the performance, numerous technical errors were noted (sound, lights, video) and the director came out to greet the audience with a microphone in his hand to apologize and promise that they would be corrected in future performances. The audience, however, welcomed the show with warm applause. After Mérida, where it can be seen until August 11, the production will travel to the festivals of San Javier (August 15), Sagunt a Escena (August 17 and 18) and Niebla (August 24) and after the summer it will begin a tour of cities such as Madrid and Bilbao.