Medea’s Kinderen

The demoniacal hag, the hysteric, the bad mother who does not know how to tame her hatred with reason and takes it out on her innocent children: no other ancient story in the history of theatre since Euripides – who was the first to even add the scene of her murdering her own children to the old myth – has provided as many pretexts for misogynistic clichés as that of Medea. In his staging, Milo Rau radically inverts her story. Instead of the Greek legend, he places at its centre a real Belgian criminal case. A mother lives with her Moroccan husband and five children in Belgium. But the father is spending more and more time with the Belgian »benefactor« who once brought him to Europe. Until, one day, the mother murders her children with near-mathematical rigour. The terrible incomprehensibility of this deed leads us towards a dizzying abyss of structural exclusion, humiliation, dependency and racism. But Rau also upends the myth at the dramaturgic and scenic level. While in the numerous existing dramatisations of this legend, the children are mute figures, who must let violence be inflicted on them while remaining speechless, in »Medea’s Children« they do not just become the piece’s eponymous heroes: They are also played by an ensemble of children aged between eight and thirteen. In so doing, they achieve something contradictory: while the audience is confronted with almost unbearably realistic violence through a perfectly-staged simulation of cruelty, for the performers on stage, the staging of illusion and theatre blood turns into a game to be relished. Violence as an instrument and its effect on the audience comes out of the world surrounding them – and is transformed, on stage at least, into a liberating exercise in resistance and overcoming trauma.

MILO RAU, born in Bern in 1977, is the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien. He studied sociology, German and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich under Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. As a director and author, he has published over 50 theatre plays, films, books and activist projects. His theatre productions have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen, Festival d’Avignon, Biennale di Venezia, Wiener Festwochen and Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, among others, and have toured to over 30 countries worldwide. From 2018 to 2023, Milo Rau was the artistic director of NTGent (Belgium).

STAGE DESIGN: ruimtevaarders
COSTUME DESIGN: Jo De Visscher
VIDEO: Moritz von Dungern
DRAMATURGY: Kaatje De Geest
LIG Dennis Diels

MIT: Peter Seynaeve / Lien Wildemeersch, Jade Versluys / Bernice Van Walleghem, Gabriël El Houari / Aiko Benaouisse, Emma Van de Casteele / Ella Brennan, Sanne De Waele / Helena Van de Casteele, Anna Matthys / Juliette Debackere, Vik Neirinck / Elias Maess