Daniela Sacco on Medea Material, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, September 25 2025

Myth becomes language of the body
Daniela Sacco, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, September 25th 2025

A contribution by Daniela Sacco on Medea Material on the occasion of the preview in Ravenna on September 26th-27th 2025, and the Round Table Medeas: Dialogues on a Despoiled Shore. A dialogue with Anja Quickert, Daniela Sacco, Azadeh Sharifi and Agata Tomšič, moderated by Benedetta Bronzini In collaboration with Goethe-Institut Mailand.

Translated by Melissa Mongelli, Università di Bologna – Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione.

“‘What’s Medea to him, or he to Medea?’
We take the liberty of rephrasing Shakespeare’s famous line attributed to Hamlet: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”

We asked ourselves: why did we grow fond of Medea? Why do we return to her and bring her back to the stage? Medea is one of the main characters in Greek mythology who, since ancient times, has been able to capture the collective imagination of all ages and draw attention from the last century to the present day, perhaps more than any other figure – think of Anouilh, Toni Morrison, Christa Wolf, Pasolini, Lars von Trier, just to name a few.

The myth’s success is propelled by its power and all its expressive variations. It feeds on its own ambivalent nature and semantic polarity, finding full expression in tragic form, in the theatre. This is a feature that our society has the ability to grasp better now than in other times, due to the troubled background surrounding us.

Medea, like all mythical figures, merges different identities without ever identifying herself unambiguously: she is a woman, a witch, a foreigner, a victim, an executioner. The version of the myth presented in Euripides’ tragedy in 431 B.C., which determined its success in the centuries to come, depicts Medea as a child murderer possessed by a vengeful rage against her husband’s betrayal. She is a highly ambivalent character, a creator of both life and death. She takes justice into her own hands; she does the unthinkable to save and find herself again. As a character representing the reclamation of one’s identity, Medea is a gateway to alterity, in all its dangerous charm. Many theatrical representations of the myth tend towards this alterity, a key to understanding our contemporary world.

Of the many Medea that the theatre has offered us, Seneca and Hans Henny Jahnn are clear references for Müller, in addition to Euripides. Seneca’s Medea is a totally foreign figure, conveyed in all her monstrosity through a visionary and poetic lyricism. Jahnn’s expressionist version of 1926 presents a black Medea, where the theme of race is used to attack the colonialist West. Post-dramatic theatre, of which Heiner Müller is one of the main exponents, fully embraces the ambivalent nature of the myth and the semantic polarity that feeds it; it also leads to an understanding and use of the myth that transcends the boundaries of plain narration. Before being narration, the myth is something plastic, fragmentary, flexible and prone to change, something capable of reshaping itself into new microcosms of meaning, giving rise to different variations. The myth becomes body language, the embodiment of an energy that finds expression in a physical action rather than its description; it is immanent and alive in the present on the stage. As a behavioural archetype, as a personified imagery, the myth is a gateway to the human soul in its personal and collective reverberations. That’s how material and vibrant Müller’s Medea is.”