Fremantle Arts Centre
May 15 2015

You could say Medea had form. She’d already chopped her little brother into pieces, scattering the bloody chunks before their father King Aeëtes to slow his pursuit of Medea and her beloved Jason, who’d just relieved the King of the Golden Fleece. She also persuaded the daughters of King Pelias, who’d sent Jason on his quest in the first place, to dice their father up and cook him in magic herbs to guarantee eternal youth. Double murder and filicide were always on the cards.

Lost & Found Opera has form too. Notorious for dishing up “lost operas in found spaces”, the Perth-based company founded by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and Christopher van Tuinen and launched less than two years ago has already taken us into hotel rooms, synagogues, art galleries and kitchens with a series of small-scale operas by the likes of Poulenc, Menotti and Jake Heggie. Performing Darius Milhaud’s 1938 opera Médée in a former lunatic asylum was always on the cards.

In librettist Madeleine Milhaud’s take on Euripides’ c.430BCE tragedy, Médée’s dumping by Jason after ten blissful years and two children in favour of Créuse, daughter of their host King Créon of Corinth, sends...