Killing On-Stage, with Milo Rau
In conversation with Joseph Pearson about »Medea’s Children«

One of the best-known tropes of Ancient Greek drama is that the violence is kept off-stage. Oedipus puts out his eyes out of view. Agamemnon’s bath is located with the tech crew, and no one in the audience needs to see Medea kill her children. Messengers report instead about the gore. And while dying might occur on stage, the act of killing both humans and animals is never shown in Greek tragedy or comedy. Even striking another person is avoided. Religious sensibilities were one reason––Dionysus could be watching his festival and be offended–– and then there was tradition, and convention. But there was likely also an aesthetic purpose: violence unseen had the force of requiring audiences to imagine the horrors instead.

Director Milo Rau is a renowned quantity in today’s secular theatre, not just at the Schaubühne––for his pieces »Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun«, »Lenin«, and »Everywoman«––but on the European stage, from Avignon’s festival to the Venice Biennale. He tells me he grew up on the Classics, and how in high school in Switzerland, studying both Latin and Greek, he translated Pindar and the »Trojan Women« of Euripides. As a young director, he produced in 2005 a piece called »Montana«, based on Euripides »Bacchae«. And this past year, he worked with NTGent on an »All Greeks Festival«, featuring all 32 remaining Greek tragedies, playing in public spaces in the city for free.

When it comes to violence, he tells me, »I love to show everything«, and he points to how the explicitness of violence has changed in the German theatre tradition just over the course of his career: »When I was coming to work in theatre, there was a Brechtian rule, you don’t show and represent. It was my generation, or the one a bit older, that of Thomas Ostermeier, that questioned it. When people saw Marius von Mayenburg’s ›Fireface‹ [1998], people said, ›oh wow, we can do this?‹ And the topic of direct realism entered the stage. Since the zeros, it has only developed«.

One of the aspects Rau tells me is most rewarding about working with material from the Ancients is the possibility for recontextualization. The stories find their cognates and the form of telling in the contemporary. Rau explains, »When I am doing Elfriede Jelenik, it’s impossible to reframe. The space is full of her. The Greeks are like a comic strip. Like with the Bible, you say one word, and you know where you are. The collective mind is already there. That’s what I like. When you say ›Medea‹: people respond immediately with something, like ›she’s a witch‹. You don’t need to tell the whole story again. One of the attractions of the classics is the opportunity to deal with stories that people already know and to engage in that collective storytelling«.

The recontextualization in this piece playing at the Schaubühne’s 2025 FIND festival is from Belgium––a contemporary and real criminal case of a Moroccan woman living with her five children and alienated by her husband. But many of the traditional talking points of Euripides’ »Medea«––the importance of Medea being a foreigner in the city of Corinth, or whether there is feminism in her rebellion against her oath-breaking husband Jason––are not Rau’s focus. Rather, he was interested in telling the story from the perspective of her children.

»As I did with ›Antigone in the Amazon‹ [2023], I’m now doing with ›Medea’s Children‹. The play focuses on actors playing women, women heroes, and a female choir. In this way, it was extraordinary for its time in history. But I wanted to focus on the unknown: many things are happening, but no children are talking. You only hear them scream from the palace when they are killed. It is the only time you hear children in Greek drama. So, I thought: why not talk to the children?«

Working with kids has its challenges and controversies when the subject is as violent as the story of Medea. Rau is already known for ›Five Easy Pieces‹ (2016), a piece with children about paedophilia. How much violence should children be exposed to in theatre, and do they experience as actors the same as we do in the audience?

Rau tells me, »The audience sees the nice children, the family, the little house, but the reality is that the most violent place in our society is the bourgeois salon. A war you might survive––that’s reality. But most people are killed at home. And I show it very explicitly, using a camera to go into the house––which is the palace––to look inside. But the other thing is that the children come back to life and reflect on what happened. It’s a play that goes in the wrong direction. I think every generation is born into a post-histoire and after-talk situation to tell you how it is. We’re promised nothing will happen, but then it happens again. This is the real violence: that we don’t even know how to escape. This is the sociological, philosophical level of what is represented«. 

There might be some strategy in beginning »Medea’s Children« with an after-show talk––something of a satyr play at the wrong moment––before we rewind and see the tragedy the children are talking about. This after-talk illuminates some of the children’s experience of the play, which is not what the audience might assume.

Rau explains, »I thought: let’s have a meta reflection on tragedy itself, through the so-called ›wisdom of children‹. There’s a kind of positive alienation when you use children. It has the effect of looking into an absurdist mirror of your own behaviour. The play has been a little disputed––as happened with ›Five Easy Pieces‹––because the children are acting in hyper-violent scenes.  Too often, theatre with children is conceived as: let them play, let them make beautiful and funny things, let’s enjoy their poetry. But I have always been more interested in social and physical violence as a liminal experience. And the truth is, the kids love to play these gory slasher moments. It’s hard for the public, but they are the children’s favourite scenes«.

Medea’s Kinderen