‘This is the story of my severed head.” As first lines go, it’s hard to beat for drama. Deborah Pugh speaks as the decapitated Medusa whose head is emblazoned on Athena’s shield. She begins by telling us how it got there and proceeds to other swashbuckling stories: of the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the seer Cassandra, the wronged mother Clytemnestra. They are all hair-raisingly told, though Penthesilea’s fight with Achilles is a showstopper, riveting in its tension and tragedy.
This is a scintillating monologue, co-created by Ad Infinitum’s Pugh and George Mann, which contains centuries of ancient Greek drama in 75 minutes. It is an alternative Iliad, of sorts, which foregrounds the heroism of its women, brave and battle-ready even as they are cast out or killed (though some fates are altered). The gods are as vicious as the men but never once do Pugh’s heroines become victims.
Pugh weaves their complicated stories in full-bodied ways, playing multiple parts with epic energy. Only momentarily do we get lost in the big jumps across time as we are carried by Pugh’s magnetic performance. She wears a white vest and looks part ringmaster, part wrestler. Her performance is variously adrenaline charged, roaring and delicate. She brings tears to your eyes and raises your heart rate.
There are very few props on stage, at the centre of which is a microphone. Pugh slings it in her back pocket and has almost magical mastery over its stand to transform it into a spear, an arrow, an axe and a walking stick (to play Hecuba, broken after Troy’s defeat).
What is as vital to the drama is its exhilarating sound design by Sam Halmarack, with compositions by Pugh and Halmarack, which is as expressive as Pugh’s words. Electronic beats thump, rumble and echo, along with metal, jazz and foley sound effects. Ali Hunter’s lighting throws a campfire hue across the stage, which conjures the sense of a storytelling circle in the oral, Homeric tradition. But there is a clear debt to physical theatre too in Pugh’s enactment. A Lecoq-trained movement director, she acts with her entire body and oozes charisma.
Earlier this year, director Ivo van Hove went “big” in his enactment of Greek tragedy, Age of Rage. This production goes small but feels enormous and epic.
At North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, on 3 November. Then touring until 18 November.
