Review | With Love, Medea’s Boys is a Hong Kong play that shouts for children to be heard
Loosely based on a Greek tragedy, the Hong Kong play, performed in Cantonese, is uninhibited, sometimes rambling, but never sombre
The Greek sorceress Medea was a cold-blooded witch.
First, she killed her brother and scattered his body parts for her father to retrieve. Then she slew her own two sons after she was spurned by the man who fathered them. Or so we were told by Euripides, the 5th century BC dramatist in Athens who wrote an account of one of the most notorious characters in Greek mythology.
With Love, Medea’s Boys uses the Greek tragedy as a starting point, but references to the original are made with the lightest of touches. There is no melodrama, no gory detail, and the 90-minute performance in Cantonese at Freespace is at times a thrillingly uninhibited affirmation of children’s right to be heard. Greta Thunberg would be pleased.
A shimmering band of light ran through the middle of the black box theatre in the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) with the audience sitting on both sides. It was the river Styx, separating the land of the living from the realm of the dead.
A ferryman and a ferrywoman escort a group of five children, including Medea’s two sons. But the journey, punctuated by children’s games, is not as sombre as the setting suggests.
The performance was a collaboration of equals between adult theatre professionals and five children aged nine to 12. Not merely actors, these “devising actors” gave shape to a work that was in gestation for about three years and had a “work-in-progress” preview in 2023.
