Between Life And Death: A Festival’s Journey Through Tragedy [Part II]

To read PART I of this report, go to this link.

Two “in yr face” Tragedies: Double Bill

It is only fitting that ancient tragedy, pioneer of the dramatic exploration of death, defeat, trauma and loss, should be central to this theatrical meditation on life’s tragic reckoning. Indeed, the festival offered a welcome surprise: a double bill featuring two canonical works of ancient Greek drama, Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, presented on the same day, in the same space, under the same directorial and scenographic vision, but produced by two different national theatres: the National Theatre of Sofia and the National Theatre of Craiova, respectively. Both productions were directed by British theatre-maker Declan Donnellan of the company Cheek by Jowl.

Volumes have been written on these “in yr face” tragedies, obviating the need to restate familiar literary analyses. Instead, I will briefly highlight what I think distinguishes these stagings from numerous other interpretations, chiefly, the bold decision to have the audience stand on stage throughout both performances, with a 30-minute intermission, sharing the space with the actors. This staging recalls Peter Brook’s concept of the “Empty Space,” where minimal semiotic markings invite renewed interpretative engagement and a reconfiguration of the boundaries between viewing and acting.

Donnellan, in collaboration with longtime set designer Nick Ormerod, removed all objects from the stage except for a central platform, creating a fluid and undetermined performance space, akin to an ancient agora or, perhaps more provocatively, a participatory, modern-day reality show. Within this open, ever-shifting environment, the spectator becomes a witness to the “unholy” dramas of Medea and Oedipus, not as palace-bound tragedies, but as societal crises unfolding in real time, in a space shared with the audience.

Participatory Theatre and the Democratization of Space

Every scene was encircled by the curious, ever-present spectator-citizen, yearning to listen, drawn voyeuristically to the sufferings of those in power. The staging allowed the audience to approach, shift perspectives and choose their own distance from the action. Similarly, the Chorus roamed freely among the viewers, speaking to them, touching them, creating a sense of communal immersion and erasing the traditional barrier between spectator and spectacle.

At times, the performance space morphed into a courtroom, with the audience occupying the implicit role of jury, bearing witness to the protagonists’ conflicting claims and the gradual revelation of truth.

Medea: A Murderer Who Knows

Medea is widely known only as a dark, unfathomable figure, devoid of any redeeming qualities, a perception that has endured through the centuries. This is perhaps expected, as such an image ensured her survival in the cultural imagination. However, we must not forget that, prior to Euripides, this mythical figure also possessed positive traits. She was, for example, a healer, a woman who saved lives.

What is particularly interesting is that, in recent years, continuous feminist reinterpretations of Medea, as well as other classical female figures such as Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, Ariadne, Alcestis, and Penelope, all victims of patriarchal systems, have begun to shift how these women are read, staged, and understood. Medea is gradually returning to the contemporary stage as what she was originally: a woman of a different kind, untamed and courageous. Throughout the journey back from Colchis to Corinth with the Argonauts, it is she who repeatedly saves Jason from threats to his life.

This “other” woman, who out of love agreed to conform to the expectations of her time regarding marriage and motherhood, is ultimately betrayed and humiliated. This betrayal drives her to madness, to fury, and to the edge. She refuses to remain silent or to accept her fate, as Jason and Creon demand. She claims everything and destroys everything, above all, the institution of motherhood itself.

All of this is rendered on stage in a clear and accessible way by Donnellan’s direction. We first encounter Medea standing, embraced in a dance with Jason on a raised platform. It is the time of first love, but only briefly. The dramaturgical adaptation propels us directly into the escalation and the conflict. From a tender, loving creature, Medea is transformed into a body strapped with explosives.

Radina Kardzhilova, the accomplished actress of the Bulgarian National Theatre, embodied a figure akin to a human bomb, primed to detonate, a performative force radiating intense emotional heat, capable of inflicting psychic burns. With this metaphorical fire, she murders Jason’s lover by gifting her a dress that literally consumes her body. Her words are fire; her actions, volcanic. Every facet—voice, body, expression—served the role of a furious contemporary woman: self-assured, wounded, ferocious in both love and vengeance, and resolute in her refusal to apologize.

Medea, at the heart of the crowd that follows her everywhere and watches her. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Courtesy of Varna Festival.

Medea’s killings are neither impulsive nor instinctual. She articulates her motivations clearly and unflinchingly as she moves among us. She kills not out of passion, but from a calculated desire for revenge. Her actions reflect cold logic rather than emotional turmoil. What act of vengeance could be more extreme than the murder of her own children?

Medea is a murderer unlike any other, unforgivable, perhaps, yet, ultimately explicable. Her abhorrent act is deeply and consciously anti-institutional, even revolutionary. It shocks with its rawness, both in action and in word. She does not conceal her egocentrism, her lack of altruism, or her absence of compassion.

Medea: “I won’t let anyone rejoice that they have plunged my heart into pain” (l.398–99);

–“Call me a lioness if you will, or a Scylla dwelling in Tyrrhenian lands—what matters is that I have torn your heart, as I longed to do” (l. 1356–1360).

–“Do you think I would ever have tried to appease him, if I hadn’t hoped to gain something, to set a trap for him?” (l.1368–1369).

This is a radical position, one that could, as I have suggested, be reinterpreted as a reaction to the oppression and exploitation she suffered within a patriarchal social order that condemned her to a life of subjugation.

Spatial Intimacy and the Politics of Belonging

Creon appears as a slick, corporate-like politician who advises Medea to leave. The director’s loosening of spatial and communicative conventions brought the audience into close proximity with Medea’s turmoil, her rage, contradictions and alienation. She roams among us, touches us, speaks to us and cries on our shoulders. And yet, despite this intimacy, she remains an outsider. She does not belong. She exists within the community, yet is never truly of it.

Creon, with the appearance of a yuppie politician, and Medea on stage where he urges her to leave. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Courtesy of Varna Festival.

The stark, focused direction gave this enraged heroine space to shine and to shock. Velislav Pavlov’s Jason was composed, rational, and emotionally detached, a man governed by self-interest and expedience. Valentin Ganev’s Creon embodied authority, manipulation and indifference. The Chorus, scattered among the spectators (Radena Valkanova, Zhoreta Nikolova, Stefania Koleva, Elena Ivanova, Nadya Keranova, and Ana Papadopulu), offered interjections that bridged the drama on stage with the collective experience of the audience.

Ormerod’s minimalist set, anchored by a central platform that ultimately becomes Medea’s tomb and the launching point of her journey toward the Sun, allowed the citizen-spectator to assert spatial agency. Through their movements and those of the actors, the space became dynamic, meaningful and inclusive, a fluid and responsive environment that liberated spectators from the fixed roles imposed by conventional theatre seating. One could sit cross-legged, wander, gaze in any direction, even leave any time, hide, or check their phone, groceries in hand.

Oedipus: The Murderer Who Did Not Know

The Romanian adaptation of Oedipus was similarly situated within a so-called meta-theatrical, emancipated and participatory atmosphere. Here, too, the director’s choices gradually transformed the audience into an extended Chorus for Sophocles’ tragic hero. Wherever he goes, we follow; we watch him, and he watches us. He speaks to us, confides in us, threatens and reassures that he will uncover Laius’s murderer. In a sense, we become his confidants. Together with the Chorus moving among us, we, too, are transformed into agents and fellow travelers. For a brief moment, we are citizens of Thebes. Oedipus’ tragedy becomes our own. His drama concerns us directly, for as long as the murder remains unresolved, the people will continue to pay the price of the crime, namely, the plague

Oedipus (Claudiu Mihail, on the right), in one of his explosive moments before the downfall. Photo: Cristian Floriganță. Courtesy of Varna Festival.

Romanian actor Claudiu Mihail delivered an Oedipus very much akin to ourselves, a citizen who happens to occupy a position of power, now forced to confront a major crisis: the pandemic. He seeks causes and consequences, the guilty and the innocent. He suspects everyone but himself.  Who did it? This question dominates all mystery narratives. Indeed, Oedipus Rex holds the distinction of being the earliest theatrical narrative constructed with the architecture of a detective story, a story that warns against hasty conclusions. Appearances are deceptive. What matters are facts, not the opinions of citizens or politicians. Sophocles, long before our time, meditated on the dangers of what we now call “post-truth.”

For this production, Nick Ormerod cleared the stage of constraining props, save for a small platform occasionally used by the actors and a hospital bed placed in the theatre’s waiting area, where the audience, upon arrival, encounters the first victims of the pandemic in an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) setting. The pandemic drama then permeates the supposed safe space of the wandering spectators, who now find themselves not so safe after all. Like it or not, they are implicated. Proximity transfers them into the heart of the pandemic drama, which becomes their drama as well. In this bare performative space, they are exposed, just as they were during the pandemic, exposed to the possibility of their own death.

Oedipus with Jocasta, approaching the recognition scene, shortly before the end. Photo: Cristian Floriganță. Courtesy of Varna Festival.

Dressed in the costume of a contemporary politician, Oedipus orates, sweats, strives to persuade us, moves among us, his electorate, assuming the role of guide and leader. Mihail’s performance was exceptional. He initially invests Oedipus with the forceful arrogance that stems from absolute certainty and the illusion of a definitive solution, only to fall, spectacularly and catastrophically, when his tragic ignorance is revealed; this is the moment he finds out that Jocasta, his wife, is also his mother and his children are also his brother and sister.

Ramona Drăgulescu as Jocasta follows her own, equally willful path of blindness until the end, when she can no longer bear the light of truth and commits suicide, at the very moment Oedipus, both literally and symbolically, blinds himself. His eyes, which led him not to truth but to illusion, are rendered useless. Freed from the post-truths of his false conclusions, he reappears on stage naked, bloodied, humiliated and tragic, and for the first time, authentic.

I reiterate that the director’s greatest achievement in both productions lay in his disarming simplicity, his ability to ground two complex tragic enigmas without diminishing their scale or reducing their intricacy. He revealed within them the ordinary human being, even when occupying a position of authority. Simplicity enabled the raw inner worlds of both perpetrators and victims to emerge with startling clarity, confronting the unresolved mysteries of life; no ornamentation, no furniture, no props were needed, only the scorching, seductive and deceptive language, and its enactment, performed by two capable national theatres.

The Jewish Tragedy

Another production with a tragic theme was 96%, staged by the National Theatre of Northern Greece and directed by Prodromos Tsinikoris. The work bears the director’s signature style of documentary theatre, this time focusing on the erasure of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community during 1942–43, in one of the city’s darkest and least acknowledged historical episodes. The title 96% refers to the percentage of Thessaloniki’s Jewish population exterminated by the Nazis, a history whose deep wound remains unhealed and continues to haunt the city as a tragic, mortal sin.

Scene from 96%, with Prodromos Tsinikoris and Alexandra Chatzopoulou. In the background, Natasha Daliaka..  Photo: Mike Rafail. Courtesy of Varna Festival.

Having previously seen the production in Thessaloniki, I was concerned about how it would resonate with an international audience, given its many local references, names, places, and historical events that might be unfamiliar. Yet judging from the extended applause, the message not only came across but did so with impact. The reception could be interpreted as recognition of the complex, labyrinthine history of the Balkans, marked by striking similarities and contradictions, both overt and subterranean, histories and mythologies that at times unite and at others divide the peoples of the region. Such a web of lived experiences, at once sorrowful and hopeful, is common to Balkan people overall.

The Balkans comprises a region with more national borders than any other area in Europe, perhaps in the world, delineating a geographically postmodern space with its mosaic of national identities. In fact, the word Balkanization is used globally to denote fragmentation. The performance mirrored this meaning quite effectively, depicting a mosaic of wounds, traumas, memories, narratives, bodies, identities, fragments and nationalities, in other words, a postmodern human geography.

Conclusion

These reflections are necessarily brief and far from comprehensive, constrained by space and time. What matters most for me is that I left this year’s festival enriched with vivid imagery and fertile memories. Even the productions that failed to impress, such as Romania’s As You Like It directed by Gábor Tompa, or Montenegro’s Pillar of Salt directed by Aleksandar Radunović, did not tarnish the overall experience, nor did the seven-hour layover at Istanbul airport awaiting a flight to Thessaloniki.  Even the outrageously priced cucumber-and-tomato sandwich (€15, with €11 as the starting price for any sandwich) could not dull the experience. Airports everywhere seem to have entered into a silent conspiracy of exorbitant pricing so that available products are utterly unaffordable. After this year’s Varna Festival, I remained undaunted.