The Revolt of Medea, Tomšič’s Melodrama, “Hystrio” n. 3, July-September 2026

MEDEA MATERIAL, by Heiner Müller. Translation by Saverio Vertone. Conception, direction, set design by Agata Tomšič / ErosAntEros. Costumes by bàste sartoria. Lighting design by Gianni Gamberini. Music and sound design by Matevž Kolenc. Featuring Agata Tomšič. Produced by ErosAntEros, Ravenna. POLIS TEATRO FESTIVAL, RAVENNA.

A sort of black room with a secular altar at its center, a corner speaker where two red balloons stand out; all around is darkness, broken by cross-lighting and the stealthy movement of a figure: Medea, Agata Tomšič, wearing a long hooded cloak. An image that introduces the viewer into an alternate, intimate, and secret space, where the queen of Colchis screams her rage and her betrayed love. In staging Heiner Müller’s Medea Material, Agata Tomšič constructs a rigorous vocal and musical score—entrusted to the music and sound design of Matevž Kolenc—which renders the meaning of the words almost abstract, translating them into sounds, laments, and strangled cries of the rabid bitch, the betrayed wife, and the mother who sacrifices her own children. Müller’s Medea—in Tomšič’s physical-vocal version—is the foreigner, she who has sacrificed everything for her man and now finds herself abandoned, an outsider to the world she chose and no longer part of the one that birthed and nurtured her. It is the condition of the migrant, of people without a land. A priestess before a mother and wife, this is Medea in her intimate and fierce song of sorrow, a song that carries the scent of a distant, magical, golden, and mysterious East, one that frequents the abyss. The Byzantine makeup on her face, her naked body displayed in a peek-a-boo reveal, the long, shiny boots—seduction and death carry with them the mystery and strength of that woman, that queen, that priestess who decides on the most unthinkable, unnatural, terrible, and arrogant sacrifice: that of her children. And those two red balloons bursting under clawed fingers are a wound, a crash that silences and becomes a resounding echo of pain. All of this possesses the magnetic force of a spoken-word musical piece in which words lose themselves in their own sound, because not all words of myth and the sacred can be understood by us humans.