Vienna Festival

Great actors, voyeuristic spectacle

Medea's children report her killing

(Bild: Wiener Festwochen / Michiel Devijver)

"Medeas Kinderen", a guest performance from Ghent, was brought to the stage by festival director Milo Rau: Euripides has a break, but six sensational children show dubious things.

"Medeas Kinderen" (Flemish with surtitles) was also unmistakably an act of rehabilitation for the festival director: After all, the opera amateur Milo Rau (the one with the shameful "Titus") had passed on command to the eminent, humanistically educated theater man of the same name. The "Medea" paraphrase that came out in Ghent was therefore something to be hoped for, especially as the approach is convincing: the victim is not the barbarian Medea, who betrays her country only to be hounded by the seemingly civilized. The victims are the children she murdered, who had no alternative.

So six young actors play all the roles sensationally: relaxed and concentrated all in one, with the intense glow that suits children on stage. Unfortunately, Euripides is merely the source of a few sentences and Wikipedia interludes. It is about the current criminal case of a woman who has killed her five children out of weariness with life.

Scene from "Medea's Children"

(Bild: Wiener Festwochen / Michiel Devijver)

These five murders are re-enacted in great detail for 15 minutes. Fear in children's eyes, endless suffocation, colorful bleeding, all transferred to the big screen without the sense of this detail becoming apparent. After all, the murderess laments her bitter fate again at the finale. So although the performance is dramaturgically and technically great, it is also speculative and voyeuristic. Essentially unreviewable.

A look at what has happened at the festival so far reveals a generally dubious picture. Hardly a refined, differentiated tone could be heard. Eso-swagger between bloody bull halves, an unmotivated homosexual orgy lasting a quarter of an hour by local standards, fires with Hammond organ (in Serebrennikov's work), Mozart's "Titus" being caricatured, the anti-Semitism debate imported by force: this may be coincidence, but the impression is that the main aim here is to attract attention through rioting.