Hotel Medea

100 participants, 15 actors, five miles of wiring, ten rooms over three floors, a 5000 year old story – and all played out over six hours in the middle of the night. Brazilian-UK theatre company Zecora Ura have set themselves a very high bar in this ambitious retelling of the myth of Medea.

After entering the dissection labs of the old University of Edinburgh veterinary school, the audience find themselves at a Brazilian street party, the mood broken when the Argonauts, updated to motorcycle leather-clad mercenaries, storm in, killing the locals and capturing Medea. A beautiful marriage ceremony in which the audience ritually strip and wash Jason and Medea closes the first act, whereupon those with tickets only for the first part of Hotel Medea leave, giving way to a series of disjointed scenes in which audience members play Jason's campaign workers and then his children, dressed in pyjamas and tucked up in bed.

Over these six hours, the audience are required to concentrate on a complicated plot, often played out in a highly oblique way. Consequently, the production requires the creation of an all-encompassing world – one so powerful that there is no question of not being completely drawn in. Unfortunately, this is far from the case—as evidenced by the audience's drooping eyes and bored expressions—and one of the main protagonists bizarrely breaking character to plug another show doesn't help.

Apart from a few extremely powerful scenes, the long minutes spent alternately watching grainy CCTV footage and then pseudo-artistic dance routines feels like a never-ending progression of overly ambitious art college exhibitions, not the moving retelling of an ancient myth.