Anna Bandettini on Medea Material, “Post Teatro – La Repubblica”, October 10 2025

WAR AND PEACE
Anna Bandettini, “Post Teatro – La Repubblica” , October 10th 2025

“[…] Medea Material is a production by and with Agata Tomšič based on Heiner Muller’s Medea Material, a harsh and bitter reinterpretation of Euripides’ original. The sorceress whom Jason abandons with her children after enjoying her protection is, for Muller, a foreigner woman, a barbarian outcast, a feminist and a slave, a witch and a heroine, free and a victim of violent power. The show, which after its preview in Ravenna will be at the Catanzaro Autumn Festival on October 12, is a solo performance immersed in darkness. Medea arrives gasping for breath on the floor, wrapped as if in a cocoon, and when she reaches the small platform in the center of the stage, surrounded by spectators seated in a circle, she gradually transforms the story of betrayal, pain, and oppression into a sort of macabre peep show where the half-naked Medea reveals herself to be a bold and lost woman, shameless and provocative, in pleasure and pain, in mercenary and sincere love. Agata Tomšič interprets her with the power of vocal expression, modulating her voice, tones, and syllables at the microphone as is now an integral part of her being an actress, accompanied by Matevž Kolenc’s musical project, but this time she puts herself on the line more than ever with her own body, not only through nudity, but also through gestures and postures that recall, as in the colors, the paintings of Klimt and the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, showing the hallucinatory power of a woman with a regal and dark soul, obscene and moving. […]”