Medea’s Children

While Milo Rau has often drawn on European history as the subject of his work, news items can also provide the spark. Not for the sake of sensationalism, but because the news often defies our understanding, arousing our compassion or, on the contrary, our repulsion. This is the case in Medea's Children : in 2007 in Belgium, a mother brutally murdered her four daughters and her son. A real-life drama whose overtones immediately recall another: that of the infanticidal sorceress Medea, exiled and forsaken by the hero Jason. While the tradition of ancient tragedy obscures and silences children, Milo Rau brings them to the stage. With disarming spontaneity and lucidity, they interpret and compare the two dramas, regularly commenting on their own performance, in a troubling to-and-fro between reality and fiction. Far from any psychologism, contrary to simplistic explanatory schemes, the murderous gesture, re-enacted on stage, retains its enigma.