The raging woman, the hysteric, the wicked mother who cannot control her hatred with reason and takes it out on her innocent children: hardly any other ancient subject in the history of theater since Euripides - who first added the episode of child murder to the old myth - has provided a pretext for so many misogynistic clichés as that of Medea. In his production, Milo Rau turns her story on its head in a radical way. Instead of the Greek legend, he puts a real Belgian criminal case at the center.
A mother lives in Belgium with her Moroccan husband and her five children. The father, however, spends more and more time with the Belgian "benefactor" who once brought him to Europe. Until one day the mother murders her children in an almost mathematically systematic manner.
The terrible incomprehensibility of this act leads to a dizzying abyss of social exclusion, humiliation, dependency and racism. But Rau also turns the myth on its head in terms of dramaturgy and staging.
In the numerous dramatizations of the legend, the children are silent figures who have to endure speechlessly what is done to them, but in "Medea's Children" they not only become the title heroes: they are also portrayed by an ensemble of children between the ages of eight and thirteen.
In doing so, they achieve something contradictory: while the audience is confronted with the mother's actions in an almost unbearable realism through the perfectly staged imitation of cruelty, the staging of illusion and stage blood becomes a pleasurable game for the performers on stage. The violence as a means and its effect on the audience comes from the world that surrounds them - and only on stage is it transformed into a liberating exercise in trauma management and resistance.
MILO RAU, born in Bern in 1977, is the artistic director of the Vienna Festival Weeks | Free Republic of Vienna. He studied sociology, German and Romance languages in Paris, Berlin and Zurich, under Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. As a director and author, he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions. His theatre productions have been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, Festival d’Avignon, Biennale di Venezia, Vienna Festival and Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, among others, and have toured over 30 countries worldwide. From 2018 to 2023, Milo Rau was artistic director of NTGent (Belgium).
(PLAY IN GERMAN)
Additional information
Accessibility
- Recommended for ages 16 and up
- The performance contains depictions of violence and a suicide attempt
In Dutch with English and German surtitles.
Dates
April 2025
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