SINGAPORE — What happens when a Greek tragedy from two millennia ago is dragged into the present and filtered through the lens of 21st century pop culture?

Well, it becomes a scandalous press conference, a stylised OTT movie, a computer RPG, a Jerry Springer-type catfight moment, an anime scene, a gun battle, and variety show musical number — all rolled into one rather silly and engaging production.

Medea On Media is basically what it says it is as Korean director Kim Hyun-tak and his theatre group Seongbukdong Beedoolkee reimagine the titular character in the classic play as, well, some kind of Park Chan-wook-ish Lady Vengeance.

The transposition is quite evident — Medea, her husand Jason’s betrayal, her bloodthirsty revenge — but the medium *is* ultimately the message for me here as Medea On Media essentially becomes a commentary on the cult of celebrity. In hindsight, Medea (played by the lively Kim Mi Ok) could very well stand in for all of celebrity’s fallen icons or at least its trope.

Here, she is attention-grabbing, manipulative, vindictive, and we never completely sympathise with her not so much because of the story — her story — per se but because of how it’s presented: All surface, fragmented, detached.

The gravitas of a “Greek tragedy” and all of the conventions it expects of its viewing audience is wiped out by the tools and strategies in which modern society perceives any kind of story. Yes, it could’ve been Hamlet or Emily Of Emerald Hill and I suspect it would’ve turned out the same way — Medea On Media is obsessed with itself and a critique of this very obsession.

The cult of celebrity is sustained, paradoxically, by what it hides and what it reveals, what it breaks down and what it shapes. Medea On Media goes through all of these swiftly, whether in a scene where reporters (unethically?) promise to back her up in her quest for revenge, to Medea and company transformed into mindless computer game avatars (like in 2011’s Loop Theory show at The Substation), to a TV show format where audiences are urged to applaud or jeer at certain actions that take place. Its Brechtian approach is apt in its demystification — the use of props to mimic rain, the actors changing in front of audiences, the every disjointedness of everything.

And yes, it’s got another function, of course — to prep you for two productions at the Singapore International Festival Of Arts: The Korean production of The Chorus: Oedipus and Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble group’s Peter Pan. At the same time, Medea On Media’s whole contemporary media thing also points to this weekend’s OPEN programme 89plus, with its issues about the Internet generation.

Which makes it the perfect chance to segue into a plug for 89plus.

“Singapore-based artists, writers, architects, film-makers, musicians, designers, scientists and technologists born in and after 1989” are invited to participate in the project—and basically get to attend a closed-door workshop with, ahem, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets.

This is separate from the 89plus event happening this weekend and will take place the following weekend. There will be an introduction on July 12, 5pm (via The OPEN pass) and the workshop will be on July 13, 11am. You can submit past work and register by July 6 at http://89plus.com/submit/.

Medea On Media runs until July 5, 8pm, at NAFA Studio Theatre. Tickets at $35 from Sistic. The OPEN runs until July 12 (Tickets for this is at S$45, with S$25 concession and certain SIFA-related discounts). For more information, visit http://theopen.sifa.sg/. For more on SIFA, visit http://www.sifa.sg/