A few positive and negative reviews of past productions of “Medea” and its adaptations:

Medea and its Double: Production in NYC by a Korean company, featuring two actors playing Medea

Dream Theatre’s Medea: More of a role given to the children

Medea in LA: Check out those knives

Another review of the same production: “…taps into primal emotions that frighten and fascinate…”

And Again: Impressive yet frustrating LA production

New York Times: Puppet Medea

A whole slew of Medea Reviews

A less positive review: I’m fairly sure the reviewer did not enjoy the production

This reviewer seems to agree

At request, technical details on how death by hanging works.  Handle with care.

Excerpted from Health.Howstuffworks.com.

The modern method of judicial hanging is called the long drop….In the long drop, those planning the execution calculate the drop distance required to break the subject’s neck based on his or her weight, height and build. They typically aim to get the body moving quickly enough after the trap door opens to produce between 1,000 and 1,250 foot-pounds of torque on the neck when the noose jerks tight. This distance can be anywhere from 5 to 9 feet (1.5 to 2.7 meters). With the knot of the noose placed at the left side of the subject’s neck, under the jaw, the jolt to the neck at the end of the drop is enough to break or dislocate a neck bone called the axis, which in turn should sever the spinal cord. In some cases, the hangman jerks up on the rope at the precise moment when the drop is ending in order to facilitate the breakage.

This is the ideal situation in a long drop. When the neck breaks and severs the spine, blood pressure drops down to nothing in about a second, and the subject loses consciousness. Brain death then takes several minutes to occur, and complete death can take more than 15 or 20 minutes, but the person at the end of the rope most likely can’t feel or experience any of it….

How Hanging Kills

In a less-than-ideal long drop, if the distance is miscalculated or some other factor misses the mark, the subject will die of decapitation (if the drop is too long) or of strangulation (if the drop is too short or the noose knot isn’t in the correct position). Strangulation can take several minutes and is a far more excruciating experience. The carotid arteries in the neck, which supply blood to the brain, are compressed, and the brain swells so much it ends up plugging the top of the spinal column; the Vagal nerve is pinched, leading to something called the Vagal reflex, which stops the heart; and the lack of oxygen getting to the lungs due to compression of the trachea eventually causes loss of consciousness due to suffocation. Death then follows in the same pattern as it does when the neck breaks, with the entire process ending in anywhere from five to 20 minutes….

…For the person being executed, the actual experience of the hanging lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes — or at least that’s the general belief by forensic scientists. In some countries where executions are carried out by hanging, though, other methods are used. In the short drop, which can be a few inches to a few feet, the subject invariably dies of strangulation and/or the compression of the arteries in the neck. The same type of death occurs in suspension hanging, in which the subject is jerked into the air instead of being dropped. And in a standard-drop hanging, the subjects falls about 5 feet. Depending on the weight and build of the subject, this drop will either break the neck and spinal cord or cause death by strangulation, carotid-artery compression or Vagal reflex. In these older methods, unconsciousness still typically occurs in anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, but if it turns out to be a few seconds, it’s blind luck (or bad luck, depending on how the country’s legal system views the practice — if the point of the hanging is severe punishment for the subject and deterrence to other would-be criminals, a “good hang” may be the most gruesome experience possible).

…a few other interpretations of Medea to check out:

and

I was struck by the use of “Grievous Bodily Harm,” an arrangement of words that has relatively little meaning for Americans, but is significant for Brits: GBH is the legal term from the Offences against the person act of 1861, describing serious injuries done to a person.  It has since become a common colloquialism for criminal injury done to a person.

That being said, a hodge-podgeof information on London Punks of the 1980s and on.  While Faeries and Murmurous are certainly not purely out of this era, there are a few interesting elements:

London Punks in the 1980s

Punk In London - DVD Trailer
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Excerpted from wikipedia’s article on Punk Rock:

United Kingdom

After a brief period unofficially managing the New York Dolls, Englishman Malcolm McLaren returned to London in May 1975, inspired by the new scene he had witnessed at CBGB. The Kings Road clothing store he co-owned, recently renamed Sex, was building a reputation with its outrageous “anti-fashion”. Among those who frequented the shop were members of a band called The Strand, which McLaren had also been managing. In August, the group was seeking a new lead singer. Another Sex habitué, Johnny Rotten, auditioned for and won the job. Adopting a new name, the group played its first gig as the Sex Pistols on November 6, 1975, at St. Martin’s School of Artand soon attracted a small but ardent following. In February 1976, the band received its first significant press coverage; guitarist Steve Jones declared that the Pistols were not so much into music as they were “chaos”. The band often provoked its crowds into near-riots. Rotten announced to one audience, “Bet you don’t hate us as much as we hate you!” McLaren envisioned the Pistols as central players in a new youth movement, “hard and tough”. As described by critic Jon Savage, the band members “embodied an attitude into which McLaren fed a new set of references: late-sixties radical politics, sexual fetish material, pop history,…youth sociology”.

Bernard Rhodes, a sometime associate of McLaren’s and friend of the Pistols’, was similarly aiming to make stars of the band London SS. Early in 1976, London SS broke up before ever performing publicly, spinning off two new bands: The Damned and The Clash, which was joined by Joe Strummer, The 101’ers former lead singer. On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in what came to be regarded as one of the most influential rock shows ever. Among the approximately forty audience members were the two locals who organized the gig—they had formed the Buzzcocks after seeing the Sex Pistols in February. Others in the small crowd went on to form Joy Division, The Fall, and—in the 1980s—The Smiths.

In July, the Ramones crossed the Atlantic for two London shows that helped spark the nascent UK punk scene and affected its musical style—”instantly nearly every band speeded up”. On July 4, they played with the Flamin’ Groovies and The Stranglers before a crowd of 2,000 at the Roundhouse. That same night, The Clash debuted, opening for the Sex Pistols in Sheffield. On July 5, members of both bands attended a Ramones club gig. The following night, The Damned played their first show, as a Pistols opening act in London. In critic Kurt Loder’s description, the Pistols purveyed a “calculated, arty nihilism, [while] the Clash were unabashed idealists, proponents of a radical left-wing social critique of a sort that reached back at least to … Woody Guthrie in the 1940s”. The Damned built a reputation as “punk’s party boys”.^[133] This London scene’s first fanzine appeared a week later. Its title, Sniffin’ Glue, derived from a Ramones song. Its subtitle affirmed the connection with what was happening in New York: “+ Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits for Punks!”

Another Sex Pistols gig in Manchester on July 20, with a reorganized version of the Buzzcocks debuting in support, gave further impetus to the scene there. In August, the self-described “First European Punk Rock Festival” was held in Mont de Marsan in the southwest of France. Eddie and the Hot Rods, a London pub rock group, headlined. The Sex Pistols, originally scheduled to play, were dropped by the organizers who said the band had gone “too far” in demanding top billing and certain amenities; The Clash backed out in solidarity. The only band from the new punk movement to appear was The Damned.

Over the next several months, many new punk rock bands formed, often directly inspired by the Pistols. In London, women were at the center of the scene—among the initial wave of bands were the female-fronted Siouxsie & the Banshees and X-Ray Spex and the all-female The Slits. There were female bassists Gaye Advert in The Adverts and Shanne Bradley in The Nipple Erectors. Other groups included Subway Sect, Eater, The Subversives, the aptly named London, and Chelsea, which soon spun off Generation X. Farther afield, Sham 69 began practicing in the southeastern town of Hersham. In Durham, there was Penetration, with lead singer Pauline Murray. On September 20–21, the 100 Club Punk Festival in London featured the four primary British groups (London’s big three and the Buzzcocks), as well as Paris’s female-fronted Stinky Toys, arguably the first punk rock band from a non-Anglophone country. Siouxsie & the Banshees and Subway Sect debuted on the festival’s first night; that same evening, Eater debuted in Manchester. On the festival’s second night, audience member Sid Vicious was arrested, charged with throwing a glass at The Damned that shattered and destroyed a girl’s eye. Press coverage of the incident fueled punk’s reputation as a social menace.

Some new bands, such as London’s Alternative TV and Edinburgh’s Rezillos, identified with the scene even as they pursued more experimental music. Others of a comparatively traditional rock ‘n’ roll bent were also swept up by the movement: The Vibrators, formed as a pub rock–style act in February 1976, soon adopted a punk look and sound. A few even longer-active bands including Surrey neo-mods The Jam and pub rockers The Stranglers and Cock Sparrer also became associated with the punk rock scene. Alongside the musical roots shared with their American counterparts and the calculated confrontationalism of the early Who, journalist Clinton Heylin describes how the British punks also reflected the influence of the “glam bands who gave noise back to teenagers in the early Seventies—T.Rex, Slade and Roxy Music”. One of the groups openly acknowledging that influence were The Undertones, from Derry in Northern Ireland. Another punk band formed to the south, Dublin’s The Radiators From Space.

In October, The Damned became the first UK punk rock band to release a single, the romance-themed “New Rose”. The Vibrators followed the next month with “We Vibrate” and, backing long-time rocker Chris Spedding, “Pogo Dancing”. The latter was hardly a punk song by any stretch, but it was perhaps the first song about punk rock. On 26 November, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” came out—with its debut single the band succeeded in its goal of becoming a “national scandal”. Jamie Reid’s “anarchy flag” poster and his other design work for the Pistols helped establish a distinctive punk visual aesthetic. On December 1, an incident took place that sealed punk rock’s notorious reputation: On Thames Today, an early evening London TV show, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones was goaded into a verbal altercation by the host, Bill Grundy. Jones called Grundy a “dirty fucker” on live television, triggering a media controversy. Two days later, the Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and The Heartbreakers set out on the Anarchy Tour, a series of gigs throughout the UK. Many of the shows were cancelled by venue owners in response to the media outrage following the Grundy confrontation.