In Medea’s Kinderen [Medea’s Children], Milo Rau takes a new, deep look at the role of children in theatre. The starting point is a real crime: the case of a mother who, in total despair, decided to kill her children and take her own life - but survived. This modern tragedy is interwoven with the classical tragedy Medea, the most infamous case of relationship conflict and infanticide in Western literature. 

After Five Easy Pieces (2016) performed in 2017 at Barcelona’s Teatre Lliure, Milo Rau again directs a group of children who are perpetrators or victims of violence. The children take a real-life violent crime and perhaps the darkest origin story of European culture as an opportunity to reflect on themselves: on family history, first loves and first encounters with death, on desires for the future and fears of the end of the world that haunt us all. How does a child cope with the divorce of their parents? With injustice, the end of friendships, pressure at school? How do they cope with the radical power of Medea – with tragedy in general? Children, condemned to silence in the classical tragedies, finally have their say this time around.

Medea’s Kinderen is a play by director, writer, filmmaker, and Wiener Festwochen director Milo Rau. Born in Bern, he is as ambitious as he is controversial. In 2007 he founded the International Institute of Political Murder and, until 2024, he was director of NTGent. In Barcelona, he made our hair stand on end by reconstructing reality at its grittiest in Hate Radio (Grec 2013), introduced us to a Belgian Salafist in The Civil Wars (Grec 2015); and at Grec 2018, in La Reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I), he explored how to bring raw violence to the stage, reconstructing the murder of Ihsane Jarfi, a young gay Belgian man (also the subject of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Ihsane, which will be seen at this edition of Grec) who was beaten and left to die a painful death in 2012 in Liège.

Produced by NTGent

In co-production with Wiener Festwochen, La Biennale Di Venezia, ITA - Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and Tandem - Scène nationale (Arras Douai).

Show for adult audiences only.
Audiences are warned that the show contains harsh images that can hurt the sensitivity of the spectators.