Medusa’s Room

Saara Turunen’s work Medusa’s Room is a subtle and dreamlike portrayal of gendered power. It examines forms of silencing from sexual harassment to how women’s endeavours to visibility in the public sphere are belittled.
Music and visuality carry forward the performance that shuns traditional narrative structures preferring instead to create powerful scenes and visions on stage. Minimalistic collage is Turunen’s trademark and forte.

The work is inspired by the Medusa myth. In Greek mythology, Medusa was a beautiful young maiden who was raped by Poseidon. As a punishment, Medusa was transformed into a frightful monster, with snakes for hair. Medusa’s gaze could turn intruders into stone. The title also refers to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 classic essay A Room of One’s Own that explains “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.

Medusa’s Room is the second part of Saara Turunen’s Room Trilogy, but it works equally well as a stand-alone drama. The trilogy explores societal norms using a feminist lens. On stage, typically Finnish restraint and expressionlessness disguise inner smouldering. The tragic and the comic are never far apart.

Medusa’s Room received its world premiere at Q Theatre, Helsinki in February 2019 to huge acclaim. The work has since been performed on the Main Stage of the Finnish National Theatre, and it featured on the main programme of the Tampere Theatre Festival. In 2020, it won the Lea Award for the best new play. In 2021, Kajaani City Theatre produced a new version of the work.