Medea

Medea. Few names evoke such fascination and horror at the same time. No other ancient story has given rise to as many interpretations and adaptations over the centuries as the myth of Medea, which was first performed in 431 BC in a version by the tragedian Euripides. As a controversial perpetrator and excessively humiliated victim, as a passionate lover and merciless avenger, Medea has remained an ambivalent figure. With Medea, the multiple murderer who kills her own children in revenge against her husband, Euripides simultaneously creates a female character who far surpasses her surroundings in intellectuality, beauty, rhetorical power, and combative determination. She helps Jason achieve success as a Greek hero. She knows the secrets of male and female fertility. She brings death and destruction. Medea betrays and destroys her family in Colchis when she helps Jason bring the Golden Fleece to Greece. In the most radical way, she burns all her bridges to follow her lover to his country and lead a different life—as Jason's wife and mother of two children. In Corinth, where she lives with her new family, she is considered a stranger. Now Jason wants to leave her to marry the king's daughter. Creon, ruler of Corinth, sends Medea into exile with the children. She is thus on the verge of losing everything. Almost. Unwilling to simply accept this as a stroke of fate, Medea sets in motion a step-by-step plan of revenge that ultimately culminates in the murder of her children, turning against both her enemies and herself. Violently and relentlessly, she demands what she believes has been unjustly taken from her or denied her. In the bloody end of the tragedy, in the murder of her children, the former distinction between friend and foe, between her own and strangers, falls away. After her horrific deed, Medea moves to Athens. King Aegeus, who had remained childless until then, is willing to grant her asylum because she promises him offspring. Medea thus appears as a highly ambivalent figure of excessive transgression—a disturbing, uncanny force that destroys old orders and establishes new ones. By Sibylle Baschung INVITED TO THE 2013 BERLIN THEATER MEETING