Medea’s Children: A “Dialogue with the Dead”. On Milo Rau’s Play

The growing tendency among contemporary directors and playwrights to foreground Medea’s children reflects a pressing contemporary concern: the emergence of a renewed conception of the tragic, one that confronts the prospect of an unimaginable, catastrophic, and seemingly inevitable future. Milo Rau’s Medea’s Children embodies this renewed tragic sensibility through the form of “new realism”, in which the children appear to return to the stage post mortem to re-enact their own story, as if seeking to expose, understand, and ultimately reclaim agency over it. In doing so, they testify to the infanticide perpetrated by contemporary society through its denial of any viable future. Their presence and their enchanted gaze reveal a humanity suspended between violence mediated by images and the direct experience of violence. Within this framework, responsibility emerges as the only form of hope that theatre can still offer. As an art of resistance, theatre reconnects reality and imagination, making possible a collective working-through of grief that contemporary society increasingly forecloses