"When he decided to include Medea in the gallery of the great myths of Greek theatre, the first and only person it seems, to have done so, Euripides appears to adopt entirely as his own this tale penned originally by Pindares. There is one detail that differs however, Euripides adds to Medea's previous crimes, that of the murder of her children. Slitting their throats, one after the other. Calmly, and with love, one might say. Moreover, exceptional in a Greek tragedy, she admits her deed. There is no moment where, as the parricidal Hercules and Agamemnon could have done, she denounces the cruel will of the gods in order to refuse to take the blame. A child-killer she is and a child-killer she will remain. For the foreigner, from Asia Minor, that she will always be, would life, her own life, that of others, have less value in her eyes than in the eyes of the Greeks ? Did she act to save her children from the barbarity of Creon's men ? Did she want, to bring it to an end, inflict on Jason, their father, a final act of revenge equal to his treason ? Had the subconscious heavy burden of her guilt drawn her to square the crimes committed for her lover, the crime of crimes committed this time against him ? Had she hoped, abandoning herself to such a degree of self-destruction, to join Jason in his emptiness and never leave him ? Or on the contrary, had she sought, in eliminating the last witnesses of her passion, start a new life, forgetting her life not only without Jason, but also her life before Jason ? The last hypothesis seems to be the one that the epilogue, with surprising serenity, prefers. Actually, whichever way one approaches this question, there is no shortage of explanations - that can or cannot be expressed, that are or are not comprehensible - for the double infanticide committed by Medea. In Euripides' miracle, or the scandal he creates, how ever one chooses to look at it, the murderer gains in mystery the more one tries to understand it. She becomes all the more seductive when they try to confound her; she is all the more humane when they try to condemn her as a savage. Furthermore, our sympathy for her grows simultaneously with our discovery of her monstrousness. Medea does not beg for our compassion, she doesn't invite it, no more than she invites the women of the chorus to forget the immemorial ban on her last crimes. She goes beyond and the spectators, as fascinated as we are horrified, go with her. At the end of this century, the most inventive but the most barbaric that humankind has known, you have to take sides. With his Medea, Euripides went further than anyone after him, from Seneca to Corneille, from Delacroix to Pasolini, from Vauthier to Heiner Muller. Nobody has been so close to the truth, nor more direct, less rhetorical, than Euripides in his exploration of the ambivalent abyss of the human animal. I have gained access to Medea through the mythology of cinema, a Medea that transits firstly through familiar figures of everyday life, and the "monster-mothers" we hear about on the news, and then attains, little by little, the sublime, the sealed world of tragedy, in a sort of astonishment, almost indifference, in the face of her own crimes. The myth of Medea, embodied in that of actress Isabelle Huppert, becomes the feminine version of the monster that inhabits us all, a familiar and destructive monster, and that will be forever a stranger to us. Jacques Lassalle
Distribution
Direction Jacques Lassalle
New translation Myrto Gondicas and Pierre Judet de la Combe
Decor Rudy Sabounghi
Costumes Emmanuel Peduzzi
Lighting Franck Thévenon
Sound Daniel Girard
Hair/make-up Cecile Kretschmer
Choir music director Bernard Yannotta
Assistant to the director Lucie Tiberghien
Decor assistant Kathy Lebrun
Cast Isabelle Huppert, Anne Benoit, Jean-Quentin, Michel Peyrelon, Jean-Philippe Puymartin, Emmanuelle Riva, Pascal Tokatlian, Bernard Verley, Olivier Barrère and Itto et Meimoun Mehdaoui
Production
Production Festival d'Avignon en coproduction avec la Compagnie Pour Mémoire, le Théâtre du Gymnase/Marseille, l'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, La Coursive-scène nationale de La Rochelle avec la collaboration du Théâtre national de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées
Avec le concours de l'Adami
Avec le soutien de Dexia-Crédit local de France, de Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent et du Centre de documentation Yves Saint Laurent
Remerciements à Bernard Yannotta et à Georges Moretti
Le texte de la pièce est publié par les éditions Comp'Act