Agata Tomšič’s interview by Stefani Stoeva on Medea Material, February 16 2026
Interview with Agata Tomšič on Medea Material on the occasion of the show’s reruns on 24 and 25 February 2026 in Sofia, Bulgaria
Leads: Stefani Stoeva, “Toplocentrala Blog”, 16 February 2026
Original article in Bulgarian: https://blog.toplocentrala.bg/p/23e
What is left from Medea – translated, reworked, recontextualized, and most importantly used as a tool of description, a tool of power, and symbol – the very thing Medea is fighting against?
A.T.: Medea puts herself before the laws imposed on her by society as a woman, daughter and mother, which is what makes her myth extremely powerful still today. She is a young woman who opposes the established patriarchal power several times: first by rejecting her father’s authority, helping the foreign occupier, Jason to seize the Golden Fleece, and sacrificing her own brother. She denies both her progeny and her homeland. A second time, after being betrayed by Jason when he tries to get rid of her to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth, she renounces her role as a caring mother and wife who obeys her husband and steps aside when she is no longer desired.
Her myth tells us of man’s relationship with the land and with women as objects to be possessed, consumed, and discarded when no longer needed. It is a metaphor of the capitalist society of which we are the products and beneficiaries: Medea is a tool for achieving a colonising goal, the new bride is a tool for climbing the social ladder. In an interview at the premiere of the text, Müller said, “Colonisation marks the beginning of European history as we know it. The fact that the vehicle of colonisation kills the coloniser foreshadows its end. That is the threat of the end we are facing. The ‘end of growth’.” The third part of his piece, Landscape with Arganuts, is the most striking, poetic and political expression of this idea. It is no coincidence that the feminist sociologist and philosopher Silvia Federici associates the misogynistic violence that demonises women, in the Middle Ages as in the 21st century, with the processes of expropriation and destruction of solidarity that go hand in hand with periods of strong transition towards a new form of capitalistic accumulation. From this perspective, Medea is a witch who opposes all this with an unspeakable act of violence: the killing of her own children to subvert the system.
Where does the guilt of today’s people play a role in your performance?
A.T.: In the already mentioned Landscape with Argonauts, we are all guilty and victims at the same time. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, we see an endless stretch of ruins beneath us, but the wind of progress inevitably pushes our wings towards the future, leaving us no chance to intervene. In the final part of my show, we are all observers of the catastrophe, visible to each other in our act of watching without doing anything. This is the tragedy that Müller shows us: our inaction in the face of the violence of exploitation, oppression, race for profit and the wars that come with it. Müller said he was inspired by The Waste Land for this monologue. In the same interview I quoted before, he stated that nowadays “the voyeur has the opportunity to pay for a good seat from which to observe as many catastrophes as possible without being disturbed”. This is one of the two fundamental keys to understanding my directorial choices, particularly in relation to the scene, the use of light, and the ‘lack of vision’ of the audience. I pursue the creation of a scene-sound-visual device in which hearing often replaces sight. And when the eyes see, they are also seen by others. It is nearly an erotic panopticon, which is overturned in the third part of the piece, where the spectators are no longer merely viewers, but become jointly responsible for the catastrophes we are living in.
What are the 3 episodes of this Medea? What is the journey of the monologue, what is the journey of light and sound through and through?
A.T.: Müller composed the text in three parts between 1949 and 1982: Despoiled Shore, which is set in Strausberg where the last tank battle of the Second World War took place and which was the headquarters of the GDR Army. According to Müller, it can be performed alongside a peep show. Medea Material, a “final honourable dispute” between a man and a woman based on Seneca and Euripides. Landscape with Argonauts, which is inspired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, “presupposes the catastrophes on which humanity is working”.
His words inspired me in my directing choices, even though I never felt obliged to be completely faithful to him, or to what we now consider his aesthetic. It was a material that completely captured me in the summer of 2024, while I was still deciding what to work on for my next show. I went back to reading it loudly every day. And every day I discovered different associations. What immediately became clear to me was that the sound dimension had to be totalising and that I wanted to establish a close relationship with the audience, which in a certain sense went in opposition to the violent gesture for which Medea is usually remembered. I was also fascinated by the eroticism that permeates the text, but also by the immense fragility that emanates from her figure and which, in the end, is transformed into a collective “I”; the radicalism, vulgarity and extreme poeticism that, in just a few lines, managed to coexist and overwhelm the listener with a shocking relevance.
Then came the iconographic references, which determined my aesthetic, chromatic and musical choices. Black-dark-assolute and yellow-gold-sun, are the protagonists of a visual device where light is dosed with the very smallest amounts to leave the preponderant role to the sound dimension. A dark and implicit homage to the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, the source of inspiration for Klimt’s femmes fatales and Burri’s tactile paintings: contemporary icons where the sacred and the profane meet, like the origins of Empress Theodora, who came from the regions bordering the Black Sea, as did Medea.
Describe your work with the text material, something so alive as the work of Heiner Müller? Where do you say stop to radicalism?
A.T.: From the very first reading, I fell completely in love with the text: its materiality, its sound. I don’t have a conventional, academic theatre background. I studied piano and dance as a child, then I got a master’s degree in theatre theory at the University of Bologna, and “only” in the last 16 years I have been working as an artist. I learned theatre practice through workshops with some of the leading figures of Italian and European theatre, but I taught myself theatre in a very punk way, simply by doing it and developing my own personal language – while continuing to refine my skills, allways, madly (three years ago, I obtained a 2nd level Master’s degree in Singing and 20th-century vocal experimentation at the Ravenna Conservatory…). When I start working on a new project, I begin with the text, but I analyse it first and foremost as material to be chewed on, as sound, which, although it has meaning, interests me for its physical form, which arises from the cavities of my body and spreads through space, using technical and technological supports, influencing the scenic-visual-sound device in which it is inserted, the associations of meaning that every spectator produces. It is material that I bring to life, or rather to flesh, infusing it with my breath, my vital blow. In the case of Medea Material, this blow is also a moan of suffering and pleasure, with which the show begins. It was very exciting for me to involve Matevz Kolenc, Slovenian composer of the famous band Laibach, with whom we worked on the previous ErosAntEros project, in this journey of research into the vocal-sound materiality of Müller’s words. I met him again this time to create the score of my new show. And since we are talking about a work where hearing is the real protagonist, his contribution, even when we found ourselves with opposing views, was much more fundamental.
Stop to radicalism…Why? I can do that when I take on the more institutional role of artistic director of our festival, but as an artist, radicalism is an indispensable tool: it allows me to imagine and make possible on stage what is not possible in real life, or not yet possible. Thanks to it, imagination becomes a political act itself. That fundamental human act, which is the basis of all creation, discovery and evolution, and which we are losing in our societies. Then, of course, all radicalism is also guided by the aesthetics and ethics of the individual artist, so it may be that something that is radical for me is not radical at all for others, or vice versa. However, I believe that it is the work that should guide me in my choices, not a bar that marks a maximum or minimum point of radicalism, beyond which it is not advisable to go.
What is the price the voyeur is paying for being a spectator, and what instruments are the artist using to induce him into participating in the act?
A.T.: In this work of mine, I explicitly play with desire and erotism. This is the second key to understanding my interpretation of the text as a director. I play with the spectators’ gaze, their desire to see, when they perceive a body, its proximity, surrounded by the materiality of the voice, but within a lighting system that does not allow them to fully grasp the desired image in its entirety. It is a desire for possession, intrinsic to Müller’s text. His Medea is extremely sensual, vulgar, visceral, almost animal-like at times. She is so in the radicalism of Müller’s language: in his choice to combine the highest lyricism with the most vulgar material in his dramaturgy, made up of ruins, blood, used condoms, the decaying materiality of his present.
Medea arouses this desire, she is both victim and perpetrator at the same time. My audience is surrounded by her presence, immersed in a dark atmosphere, made up mainly of sound and very little light, throughout the first part of the show. In the second part, she steps onto a platform to offer herself and her body to the gaze of others, in an act that is similar to a sacrifice, paradoxically at the very moment when she throws her deadly curse on Jason’s new bride and ends the lives of her own children. As this happens, I address the audience sitting around me in a circle, as if they were the children who betrayed me. And in the last part, they will be the protagonists along with me: the Argonauts, the exporters of democracy, the exploiters of our planet and the creatures that live on it, guilty like me, but also victims of the world we live in and of our inertia towards it. It is a dystopia. It is our reality. Indeed, perhaps our reality is already much worse than that, only we pretend not to see it in order to continue our daily race. Pasolini said – in a poem at the centre of La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Sequence of the Paper Flower) in 1968 – that “innocence is a fault”. His words resonate very strongly with me in this last part.
What is the right power play between the audience and the artists on stage? Ag§ain, where do you cross a line?
A.T.: When I go on stage, I am sincere and try to give myself completely. In this work, I exposed myself more than usual, especially with my body, and I made some uncomfortable, problematic choices. The themes of the show are problematic. Femininity is. Müller conceived the female body as “the battlefield of the conflicts of our time”. For my part, I chose to give body and voice to an extremely feminine Medea, even too much so for the most orthodox feminists and Müllerians. But I felt the need to interpret her in this way, to play a game with the audience: a game of glances, desire to see, discomfort, and sometimes, perhaps, embarrassment. At a certain point, I said to myself that, whether people like it or not, what matters is that it does not leave them indifferent. And in the end, at least so far, it seems that people do like it too.
Warning or understanding? What pulses from the stage of Medea?
A.T.: Both, but as you rightly say, they are impulses. Stimuli, not answers or ready-made recipes. In fact, the text I started from is very difficult to understand and follow, even in one’s own language, imagine how much more so with subtitles. But its complexity has the virtue of opening the spectator’s imagination to multiple worlds and nuances, through the montage that the author creates in it. This can be disorienting, but it has the ability to make our brains work: it is each person’s associations that ultimately create the dramaturgy of the show – starting from the text and all the other performative languages I use. For each person, this dramaturgy is inevitably and wonderfully different, unique. With my choices, I have tried to give strength to this post-dramatic dimension of the text: enhancing the sound materiality of the word, which itself creates another level of meaning, acting in parallel; with the visual device, the lighting and the seating arrangement. All these choices place the spectators in a particular condition, making them play a specific role at different moments of the show. Even from a political point of view.