Tragic Replay: Performativity, Myth and Reality in Milo Rau’s Medea’s Children

This article considers the workings of performativity and agonism in Milo Rau’s Medea’s Children, presented at the National Theatre in Prague in November 2024. A provocative work that reimagines the Classical myth of Medea through a contemporary lens, Medea’s Children raises pointed questions of theatrical affects and effects. The performance mobilises a repertoire of postdramatic and metatheatrical techniques that have come to characterize Rau’s dramaturgy. Drawing a line from Jacques Derrida’s thinking on absence, iterability and context through to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, the article analyses the use of non-professional child actors who both enact and reflect on the traumatic events of the performance, destabilizing the boundaries between reality and fiction, and presenting the myth as a living, polymorphous structure. Medea’s Children thus generates a space where audience expectations are both anticipated and manipulated so that the act of performance becomes an agonistic arena. The concept of agonism (with reference to Chantal Mouffe) is used to explore how the play stages a confrontation between diverging viewpoints, highlighting the irreducible nature of societal (and existential) conflicts where differing perspectives on victimhood, justice, and suffering coexist and clash. Ultimately, the article contends that Medea’s Children serves as a performative act of resistance, questioning the narratives of power and victimhood, and inviting the audience to weigh the complex interplay of personal and political struggles within the mythological and contemporary contexts it interleaves.