FOREIGN SUN: EPISODE V

About the show

Medea in Corinth: The Lost Children With *Medea*, Euripides created one of antiquity’s most fascinating and disturbing tragedies. The work boasts an immense history of reception, spanning over 200 adaptations. Initially merely an episode in the voyage of the Argonauts, Medea evolved over the centuries into one of world literature’s most significant female figures. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s adaptation of the material combines the tragedy of Euripides with the psychological approach of Grillparzer, focusing on reflections regarding the image of the mother within a male-dominated society. Jason and Medea have left behind a restless, nomadic existence in Greece. Medea remains an outsider—viewed with suspicion and shunned; she certainly fails to meet local expectations of what constitutes a "good" wife and mother. The couple had been forced to flee Iolcos under suspicion of murdering the ruler Pelias. Now, in their new place of refuge in Corinth, Jason decides to end this ill-fated union and leave Medea in order to marry Creusa, the king’s daughter, and finally become king himself. Medea and the children are to be banished; the foreigner has simply become a nuisance. Faced with this, she resolves to commit a monstrous act: she will sacrifice her two children—driven by her sense of justice, by a desire for retribution for the resentment and mistrust she has endured, and as a cruel act directed at Jason, herself, and the fateful decision to follow this man into a foreign world.