Elisa Bianchini on Medea, “Corriere di Romagna”, May 8 2026

Medea against patriarchy: a violent revolution, “Corriere di Romagna”, May 8 2026

“Müller’s text is not just a reflection on women and the female figure: her violent rebellion against a patriarchal system is one of the most violent revolutions. Medea kills her own children to change the system she lives in, to deny her role as a wife and mother—a woman who steps aside when her husband no longer desires her or no longer uses her for his own political purposes, because Jason does that too. We are talking about a Greek hero, an exporter of democracy, who occupies a barbarian territory and appropriates the Golden Fleece, using the king’s daughter for his own colonizing purposes. And when the king’s daughter becomes an exile with him in another land, and is also the mother of his children, but no longer serves his political purposes, he sees fit to ask for the hand of the daughter of the king of the realm they have moved to, thus making his social climb. Using another woman for his own purposes, as if she were an object. One can understand from this alone the power that this text also holds over our present. This was already written in the ancient myth, but Heiner Müller has the ability to emphasize it to the nth degree, writing a triptych where the third monologue is no longer in the first person by Medea, but is written in a collective first-person plural, where I and the audience are equally victims and perpetrators of the world we have plundered, colonized, capitalized on, and of the catastrophe resulting from these actions of ours, in the face of which we are no longer able to react.”