Description

Meet the most sympathetic Medea ever to have appeared on the Victorian London stage, the joint creation of the burlesque writer Robert Brough and the transvestite actor Frederick Robson in Medea; or, The Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband.   Robson (formerly an apprentice to an engraver) took the role at the Olympic theatre, in what was intended to be a parody of the serious Italian actress Adelaide Ristori’s performance in a French tragedy about Medea at another venue at the same time (1856-7). But Robson stole her thunder, and also brought Medea to a much more cross-class audience.

Robson’s Medea was considered more tragic than Ristori’s by Charles Dickens: ‘It is an odd but perfectly true testimony to the extraordinary power of his performance (which is of a very remarkable kind indeed) that it points the badness of Ristori’s acting, in a most singular manner, by bringing out what she does and does not do. The scene with Jason is perfectly terrific; and in the manner in which the comic rage and jealousy does not pitch itself over the float at the stalls is in striking contrast to the manner in which the tragic rage and jealousy does. He has a frantic song and dagger dance, about two minutes long altogether, which has more passion in it than Ristori could express in fifty years’.

Brough and Robson, who emphasized the poverty which Medea faced on the streets of Corinth, won more sympathy for her than any men of the theatre previously. Another critic wrote, ‘Mr Robson was the Medea of vulgar life; and, in the climax of the interest, he passed out of the burlesque altogether . . . with an earnestness that dissipated all mockery, and made every heart in the house thrill with painful sympathy.^’