Dubrovnik Summer Festival, Croatian National Theatre in Varaždin and Slovenian National Theatre Maribor
S.Stone/H.Müller: MEDEA
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Director: Martin Kušej
Translation and dramaturgy: Vesna Đikanović
Translation (Heiner Müller: Medea – material): Snježana Rodek
Set designer: Annette Murschetz
Costume designer: Ana Savić Gecan
Composer: Aki Traar
Lighting designer: Vesna Kolarec
Video matherial author: Tobias Jonas
Associate set designer: Hana Ramujkić
Assistant Director: Herbert Stöger
Second assistant Director: Katarina Julija Pipan
Assistant costume designer: Tjaša Frumen
Croatian language lector: Ines Carović
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Ana (Medea): Helena Minić Matanić
Luka (Jason): Uliks Fehmiu
Klara: Julija Klavžar
Nurse/Narrator: Maša Žilavec
Christian: Vladimir Vlaškalić
Borut: Aleš Valič
Edi: Tvrtko Kolar
Leon: Jan Rendić
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One of the most important female characters is played by the great European director Martin Kušej, based on the text by Simone Stone and Heiner Muller. Through Medea's motifs, Kušej wants to question the cruel mechanisms of the world, Medea's otherness, and her position in social and political terms, especially in a time of growing xenophobia.
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Medea is one of the most enigmatic and complex women in the dramatic universe, whose monumentality has shattered many interpretations and divided feelings of the audiences. She is brutal, leaving no room for anyone, neither the actors nor the audience, to hide. She is raw and purifying like a ritual act. Outside the patterns of rationality. No matter how much we try to suppress her, she will resurface. She moves through time from antiquity to the present day, with the strength of all those women who, since those ancient times, have always faced the same exclusion from the community, whose conflict inevitably changes everyone's lives.
With his twenty-first-century Medea – the brilliant scientist Anna, Simon Stone creates a realistic life in a familiar contemporary context, with a successful career and family environment, everything that their ancient ancestors might represent today. But beneath the contours and surface of the contemporary story, emotions and violence flow violently, in an almost primordial pattern and rhythm, with urges that exist within us, where all essential questions, as old as humanity, emerge. Their life on stage elevates the contemporary love triangle, because love is at the core of all endeavours and wars, to the level of an archetype and its universality of conflict, creating material for a strong, brutally stripped performance that inevitably leaves a mark on the soul.
Anna enters a twenty-first century world that is already in flames, full of burnt-down ruins, abandonment and violence. This world of crossed boundaries is witnessed by Anna's/Medea's steps into Heiner Müller's monologues in which the condemnation to decay and death is a statement of collective experience. She leaves such a world, leaving it with yet another burnt-down place with all her prized possessions. She reacts to a world that brutalizes her experience of life, dislocates and removes her. Her experience becomes part of a universal question about the condition of a human being whose identity has been trampled upon by violence and pragmatism, in which anyone exposed to a similar and sufficient kind of pressure and provocation could feel and behave similarly. Therefore, this play is also about empathy, when we become too fragile, when the mask slips from our face and we can no longer hide our pain, fear, anger or hopelessness.
Vesna Đikanović