Medea is considered the most notorious relationship tragedy in Greek Antiquity. The conflict culminates in Medea killing her own children, who are condemned to silence throughout the tragedy. Milo Rau turns this classic arrangement on its head in Medea’s Children: six young people between the ages of eight and thirteen speak up. Setting out from an actual crime and Medea’s multiple murder, the children reflect on the absurd and bloody tragedies of the adult world and on their own personal (tragic) realities. By repeating scenes of Medea on stage, combining ancient and modern characters and dissecting the horrific violence through reenactments, the children seem to want to oppose the eternal doom of tragedy. It is a short history of the theatre and an equally cruel as poetic school of life.
De Morgen (Belgium)
31 May, 8 pm, 1 June, 4.30 pm, 2 June, 2 pm
Jugendstiltheater am Steinhof
Dutch
German and English surtitles approx. 90 min.
Q & A
1 June, following the performance
PLEASE NOTE
Age recommendation 16+. The performance includes representations of violence.
With Peter Seynaeve, Anna Matthys, Emma Van de Casteele,Jade Versluys, Gabriël El Houari, Sanne De Waele, Vik Neirinck Direction Milo Rau Dramaturgy Kaatje De Geest Stage design ruimtevaarders Video design Moritz von Dungern Musik Elia Redinger Light design Dennis Diels Costumes Jo De Visscher Props
Joris Soenen Acting coaching Peter Seynaeve / Lien Wildemeersch Translation surtitles Lotte Hammond Surtitles Katelijne Laevens
Production NT Gent Coproduction Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien, La Biennale di Venezia, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Tandem – Scène nationale (Arras Douai)
executed by the team of the Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien
Premiere April 2024, NTGent
Medea’s Children is Milo Rau’s latest play, which brings together three themes that have occupied Rau in the last years: the theme of Belgian crimes ((Five Easy Pieces (2016), La Reprise (2019)), that of ancient myths (Oreste in Mosul (2019), The New Gospel (2020), Antigone in the Amazon (2023)) and that of the private life (Familie (2020), Everywoman (2020), Grief & Beauty (2021)).
Eight years after Rau’s first production with children, he once again gives the main roles over to young actors and once again lets them address a topic from which adults normally want to shield them: Five Easy Pieces addressed the most infamous paedophilia case in Belgium (Marc Dutroux) and Medea’s Children reenact a filicide, the killing of children by one of their parents.
Setting out from Euripides’ Medea and the materials of a real-life Belgian criminal case, Rau and his team spoke in depth to the children about their view of the small things in life, the banality of the ordinary, as well as the impossibility of grasping our tragic existence. The crime scene is as exemplary of everyday life as it is tragic and dangerous: the own home. The house and the desolate beach landscape on the stage are embedded within a wider world via video projections which, combined with Elia Rediger’s compositions, oscillate between harmlessness and a sense of drowning in dystopian discomfort. Building on witness statements, the children re-enact scenes from the actual criminal case and then slip into the roles of Euripides’ figures. Everything is imbued with the question of the power of theatre: can a re-enactment, the repetition of scenes, bring about catharsis? At the same time, the children’s existential
contemplations are strikingly sober: they are very well aware that it would be better for the survival of the planet if humanity ceased to exist and that they, too, are condemned to being a part of the tragic order of the world. Yet they hope that they are not the last generation, that they can escape their own fate. They dream of careers as actors or lawyers and have a passionate yearning for love, although they know that they will lose all their loved ones. What is it that drives humans to try and fail time and again despite their own better knowledge? This is a question posed not only by Becket, but also by the Greek tragedies, opines Rau.
After the real-life crime has been intertwined with the two-and-a-half-millenia old story of Medea, the children initially turn their hopeful glances into the audience, yearning to find a Socratic partner for a conversation there, someone who will ask the right questions. In the end they have to accept, however, that human existence does not provide for an after-show talk and that they, too, have to surrender to the inevitability of the final curtain.
The tragedy Medea was written by Euripides in 431 BCE and is based on the mythological figure of the same name. Medea, an oriental princess and daughter of King Aeëtes, helps Jason in his search for the golden fleece because she is in love with him. Jason has to steal this fleece from King Aeëtes and pass it on to his uncle Pelias, who had intended to keep Jason from his rightful place on the throne of the Kingdom Iolcus by giving him this apparently impossible task. Medea helps Jason on the condition that he marries her and in doing so opposes her own family. Having solved three almost impossible tasks, Jason and Medea take the golden fleece and escape to Iolcus. However, upon their arrival there, Pelias still refuses Jason his place on the throne. Seeking revenge, Medea tricks Pelias’ daughters into killing their own father. Once again, Jason
and Medea have to flee, together with the two sons that have by now been born, and they end up in Corinth.
The action of Euripides’ tragedy begins in Corinth. There, Medea lives her life as an outsider without roots, she is avoided and feared for her magic powers. Jason has entered a relationship with Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. When Medea finds out that Jason will leave her and King Creon will banish her from Corinth, she loses her mind with grief. She decides to arrange her own escape and kills Glauce as well as – accidentally – King Creon. Eventually, she commits the ultimate act of revenge: She kills her own children in order to destroy Jason. It is assumed that this act in which Medea kills her own sons is a dramatic addition made by Euripides; in other versions, the children are
killed by, for example, the angry Corinthians in revenge for the murder of their king and their princess. In the end, Medea flees on a dragon’s chariot sent to her by her grandfather, sun god Helios.
Euripides turns Medea into a performer and rhetorician. She captivates the audience with her eloquence and takes them deeper into her world with each of her secret soliloquies. By dramatising the events that lead up to Medea’s murder of the children, Euripides shows how it is possible for something apparently inconceivable to occur. He demands from the audience that they recognise the roots of the tragedy in the familiar aspects of their own world.
He draws a stirring, appalling portrait of a woman with exceptional powers and an unrelenting thirst for revenge, while at the same time her behaviour and interactions in the course of the drama show how ‘normal’ she can seem. When Medea appears triumphant in Helios’ chariot on the roof of the palace at the end of the play, the rhetorician and performer is turned director, about to stage her own exit from the drama.
Of the three tragedians, Euripides was the one whose figures were most closely modelled on the modern Athenians – he copied their manner of speaking and addressed their fears. However, in contrast to Sophocles and Aeschylus, he refused to consider the events in a greater cosmic context. While many figures in Medea call on the traditional Greek deities to recognise their suffering and deliver justice, there is no apparent divine answer to Medea’s deeds. The play leaves it open to the audience to find their own path, to make sense of the inconceivable.
Milo Rau, born 1977 in Bern, was director, writer and artist in residence at NTGent. Rau studied sociology, German and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich with Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Critics call him the “most influential” (Die Zeit), “most awarded” (Le Soir), “most interesting” (De Standaard), “most controversial” (La Repubblica), “most scandalous” (New York Times) or “most ambitious” (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002, he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions. Rau’s theatre productions have been shown at all major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d’- Avignon, the Venice Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and have been touring in over 30 countries worldwide. Milo Rau has received many awards, includ- ing the 3sat Prize and as the youngest artist after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch, the renowned ITI Prize of the World Theatre Day in 2016. In 2017, Milo Rau was voted Director of the Year in a survey conducted by Deutsche Bühne, in 2018 he received the European Theatre Prize for his life’s work and in 2019 he was the first artist ever to be appointed Associated Artist of the European Association of Theatre and Performance – EASTAP. In 2020, he received the renowned Münster Poetry Lectureship for his complete artistic oeuvre. His plays were voted “Best of the Year” in critics’ surveys in over 10 countries. In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden, in 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ghent University. Milo Rau has been artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen since 1 July 2023.
PUBLICATION DETAILS Owner, Editor and Publisher Wiener Festwochen GesmbH, Lehárgasse 11/1/6, 1060 Wien P + 43 1 589 22 0, festwochen@festwochen.at | www.festwochen.at General Management Milo Rau, Artemis Vakianis Artistic Direction (responsible for content) Milo Rau (Artistic Director) Text credits Contribution by NTGent, 2024. Adapted for Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien. Picture credit Cover © Estate of Bernard Safran, Medea (1964, revised 1994), oil on Masonite, 86.4x 104.1 cm, p. 5 © Michiel Devijver Produced by Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH (Bad Vöslau)
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