Medea*

Social ties have been severed, there is no firm ground beneath one’s feet (only the floating white cloths of Zahava Rodrigo’s set design) and the destructive and self-destructive actions have already set their inescapable momentum in motion. Leonie Böhm and actor Maja Beckmann show a woman in free fall. In this sense, the production is not particularly interested in elaborating on the horrendous deeds at the end of the play – the murder of Glauce, Jason’s new love interest, or the murder of Medea’s children. Instead, it chooses to focus on the development that precedes her act. The self-empowerment that is inherent to it. The new scope for growth it might create. This Medea* from Zurich (the gender asterisk raises it above all binary positioning) is one who has read Christa Wolf and who is at least familiar with Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin. Even if the text that she speaks is mainly by Euripides, apart from a few improvised lines, in a new translation by Herbert Meier. A Medea, too, who mirrors the passage à l’acte with the audience in the performer’s first entrance situation. This is comparatively harmless, of course, but it manages to substantiate one point of conflict. This is a Medea of vivid images: for example, when she describes her exile situation as one where her keys are the only ones that no longer fit any door. All locks have been changed and she never knew that it was happening. The ways in which Maja Beckmann develops her performance, Leonie Böhm arranges images, Johannes Rieder reflects the events on stage in music, are breathtaking and intelligent. It is an attempt to not reject terror as an inhuman monstrosity but to think it and thus make the human monster intelligible.