Maria Dolores Pesce on Medea Material, “Sipario”, October 3 2025

MEDEA MATERIAL – direction Agata Tomšič 
Maria Dolores Pesce, “Sipario”, October 3rd 2025
https://www.sipario.it/recensioniprosam/item/16978-materiale-per-medea-regia-agata-tomsic.html

“[…] Agata Tomšič, with her blend of lyricism and ‘political’ insight, is not only the creator and director of this work, but also its talented performer, starting with her stage presence, in which anger prevails over feelings of pain, a sometimes disturbing presence that is revealed little by little, like a new Salome witnessing the fall of the human halo into her mud.

Through her, the many Medeas appear and disappear, from being a foreign goddess and, as such, a barbarian at the foot of the walls of Corinth, to being a defeated and colonized people over every land in this world, to being a female enchantress who shows herself sculpted in her body, physical and therefore perhaps inaccessible, to finally being subordinate and neglected, as if men and their patriarchy feared, or perhaps envied, her vital force and her creative intelligence.

The entire show is played out on appearing and hiding, suddenly illuminating the actress’s movements as if in a slow-motion film, sculpting and stacking them on stage like pieces of a mosaic to be recomposed, and finally sinking into the depths of that intuitive memory in a Sartrian daydream that has suddenly vanished.

The mise-en-scène manages, in Saverio Verrone’s relentless translation, Heiner Muller’s language, harsh, sharp, and at times so cruel as to appear obscene and thus, as in Fassbinder, deeply revealing; a language that sometimes seems to reject the stage itself, becoming a real wound in the actress’s body as she takes refuge in Hades, that is, in the Olympus of literature.

Therefore, thanks also to Gianni Gamberini’s beautiful lighting design, “absolute – black – dusk” and “bronze – gold – sun ” compete for the proscenium, fighting each other but being the inseparable faces of the same mirror, just as the “Golden Fleece,” protagonist of the myth that peeks out in the beautiful costumes by Bàste Sartoria, is symbolically transfigured from an instrument of life capable of healing every wound to an instrument of death when used for boundless human ambition.

The soundscape is a dialogue between the dark electronic music of Matevž Kolenc, the hands of Agata Tomšič, which rhythmically and ritually beat objects, and her voice, which sometimes becomes pure sound.

It is a very engaging and enthralling show that goes beyond its own script and is enriched by countless suggestions that draw on myth to evoke the painful human condition in its continuity and relevance.

At the end, there was long applause at the preview.”