2023-07-23 18:05:45
Ironically, Frank Castorf, theater anarchist and ex-director of the Berlin Volksbühne, is allowed to stage one of the greatest classics of antiquity – and that in the best-preserved amphitheater in Greece: No wonder that his “Medea”, the highlight of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, was already controversial in advance.
The theater festival is the Greek equivalent of the German classics in Bayreuth. Year after year since the 1950s, the Greek theater has become an ancient experience in front of an impressive backdrop. Just like Bayreuth, the festival navigates between being open to bold, contemporary productions and the more conservative demands of the audience. Castorf’s “Medea” is the successor to a production of Luigi Cherubini’s Medea opera from 1961 – with none other than Maria Callas in the leading role.
The theater evening begins for the audience with climbing the theater hill. Passing signposts to the old sanatorium of the Asklepios temple, we climb stairs through olive groves. At the foot of the mountain, the crowd leaves behind the famous orange juice, which was quickly drunk at the kiosk. The excitement can be clearly felt in the crowd – especially when looking for space across the twelve wedge-shaped segments. The two performances, each with 9,000 seats, are sold out despite the reservations about Castorf. As the sun sets, the opposite mountain ridge appears on a large video screen above the stage.
The lights are still on on stage! “Medea” in Epidaurus
Quelle: Alex Kat (@alexkatphotography)
The stones are still warm from the 40 degrees of the day. The audience looks like one big insect, made up of thousands of subjects and program booklets that have been converted into subjects and that you will no longer be reading anyway. In the first rows, heavily coiffed women of all ages sit in long caftans and mix their perfume with the smells of a public that only leaves the house in the evening. If you look back from below to the last row, you can see the last heads only the size of a pinhead. The theater is immense. Everyone waves and greets each other. In view of the heat wave, you still look surprisingly elegant.
Driving from Athens to Epidaurus, to get to the Peloponnese one has to pass Corinth – the place where Medea took refuge with her husband Jason, the father of their two children. Medea had helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece from her father. She travels with Jason and the Argonauts to Pelias, where Jason attempts to trade the Fleece for rulership of the state there. Since this fails, both move stateless to Corinth. There Jason decides, after a few years together with Medea, to marry the daughter of the ruler Creon. This puts Medea in a rage and revengeful, finally she murders her children.
There are numbered cushions on the stones, and the seats are quickly swapped back and forth so that you can sit together. Others are already sitting still and staring spellbound at the stage floor, which is littered with plastic bottles. After a delay, the evening at the theater finally begins.
“Fick cells with district heating”
The cities of the future can now be seen on the screen. Cooling waterfront skyscrapers in the sunshine and empty asphalt – a stark contrast to several tents on a stage covered in plastic waste. All this is overwritten with the slogan “temporal open markets”. A dystopian sight that looks a bit worn in its imagery. It was only at the last Venice Biennale that Loukia Alavanou staged a production of “Oedipus at Colonus” in the Greek pavilion, set in the poor and littered suburbs of Athens.
The five actresses and three actors of the evening run across the stage, which immediately seems too crowded – because they all play everything. They begin to play Heiner Müller’s Medea dialogues, and the surtitle screen reads: “DEGRADED SHORE, MEDEA MATERIAL, LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS”. Müller may also have had the idea for the stage design, because the text now says “the children design landscapes out of garbage”, “fuck cells with district heating”.
The play doesn’t really get going in the first twenty minutes – and there’s still no sign of Medea’s anger. All change their roles and are alternately Medea or non-Medea. But then they all step down – except for one Medea. A piece unfolds that is unusually linear for a Castorf. The textual focus is on the first dialogue between Medea and Jason, from the text by Müller and the ancient version of Euripides.
Garbage scene: “Medea” in Epidaurus
Quelle: Alex Kat (@alexkatphotography)
Nevertheless, the Creon/Medea conflict – the state against the stateless – is in the foreground of the production. After Jason has decided to marry Creon’s daughter Glauke, Creon wants in return that Medea and the children leave Corinth. Nikolas Hanakoulas mainly plays Creon, because the roles are also distributed fluidly among the men. His role changes to that of a prison guard on the Greek island of Makronisos. In the late 1940s, left-wing partisans who had previously fought against fascism, including Mikis Theodorakis, were imprisoned in concentration camps. Minutes are read from this time.
Multiple Identities: “Medea” in Epidaurus
Quelle: Alex Kat (@alexkatphotography)
Medea becomes a question of what happens when the state turns against its own citizens. She is driven by the fact that she paid a price for her right to integration, the promise of which is now not being kept. “Give me my blood back from your veins… Today is payday Jason Today your Medea collects her debts,” she shouts across the stage. Those in power, like Pelias, do not keep their word – and, like Creon, exclude from the state that which they call “barbaric”.
This conflict is transferred to the international community of states in the play. In a kind of child’s play, the actors take on the roles of different countries: Germany, the USA and Israel on the one hand, and Russia, China and Turkey on the other. They declare war on each other. The Coca-Cola sign above the stage is in disrepair. Medea, who comes to Greece from the distant Caucasus region, represents the conflict between “barbarism” and the rational progress of western reason. The cruel role of Europe in the submission of an anti-colonial counter-power is also evoked in the performance of the Rimbaud poem “A Time in Hell”. The poet writes hatefully about the colonial power France. Medea speaks: “Wounds and scars give good poison”.
afraid of himself
Castorf shows how the promise of the West, rooted in antiquity, that democracy brings freedom has failed. Here, Medea’s female aggression becomes a metaphor for a fight for recognition against the male, western state. And so the most dramatic sentence of the evening remains the one that Medea says to Jason: “You owe me a brother”. Medea is overcome by a creeping loneliness.
One question remains: Why is Medea attacking her charges this time as well? Some in the audience close their eyes during the murder scene, which is also the end. Medea makes you afraid of yourself. Every time one hopes that she doesn’t kill the children after all. Maybe this time it’s her desperation, maybe she just wants to harm Jason, or maybe it’s the impossibility of the children’s true integration into Creon’s promise to bring about equality among its citizens.
It remains a multi-layered staging, no analogy really works. But it is precisely this openness that makes this outstanding, contradictory Castorf evening so special. At this ancient sanctuary, the East Berliner, who has long been an international star director, shows that theater does not heal, but has to stir.
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