#MeToo Medusa

Medusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and splitting at the ends. The premise is promising. This Medusa story is a Perseus prequel: the girl who became a gorgon. The young Medusa (Natalia Osipova) is a priestess at the temple of Athena (Olivia Cowley). Her beauty is legend and the sea god Poseidon (Ryoichi Hirano) is keen to get his webs on her. Poseidon rapes Medusa and angers the virgin goddess Athena. But it is Medusa, not Poseidon, who is punished. Athena makes Medusa a monster. Then along comes Perseus (Matthew Ball), no hero he, to cut Medusa a savage short back and sides.

Cherkaoui, artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, has said that his Medusa is about ‘power and the abuse of power’. This #MeToo Medusa is a brave effort that trips over its own winged sandals. There has been a justifiable fuss in recent years about ballet’s ‘rape problem’. Want to spice up your second act? A rape scene will do it. See Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, The Judas Tree, and The Invitation. In Arthur Pita’s The Wind, Osipova was a pioneer bride raped in a prairie storm. Cherkaoui’s Medusa, then, is a noble endeavour, drably realised. Medusa ought to petrify, not bore to torpor.

Osipova is mesmerising all the same. Her subtle, supple shifts from brittleness to sinuous ease make her body both serpent and statue. Poseidon’s assault is muted: a suggestion of something slimy, something unwanted; a scaled and salted violation, but nothing graphic or gratuitous.

Athena’s transformation sees Osipova cursed with a frightful Ascot fascinator, a Halloween shock-wig of black pipe cleaners. What possessed the costume department? Perseus wears a fishnet boiler suit and Poseidon a tinfoil kilt.