Medea. Voices (Medea. Stimmen)

Adaption by Tilmann Köhler und Juliane Koepp

"What are they talking about? I, Medea, supposedly killed my children. I, Medea, wanted to avenge disloyal Jason. Who is to believe that?"

Banished from the royal palace, where she and her husband Jason and their children found exile, Medea tells her version of her story: how she had to leave her country, discovered a horrendous crime, asked inconvenient questions, and how a mesh of defamations and lies drove her out of the palace.

Medea. Voices originated as a radical correction of the predominant image of Medea. It was only since Euripides, not before, that she represented the bloodthirsty fury who murdered her children. Christa Wolf questions the sovereignty of historical interpretation – and in whose interest it is to cast the "wild woman" as a murderer. But the author’s main theme is the self-destructive tendencies of western civilization: colonialism, xenophobia, exclusion. In the final scene, when the people are incited and blind with hatred for the stranger, Medea only has to ask: "Is a world conceivable, or a time, into which I could fit?" – an angry question, a resistance against resignation, in search of a new beginning, of new hierarchies of values, of the future.

Nominated for the Friedrich-Luft-Award 2018