A giant screen with a dangling Coca-Cola logo stretches across the stone stage of the Ancient theatre of Epidaurus. It dominates the skyline, eclipsing the Peloponnese hills behind. A monumental theatre, with seats for almost 10,000 people, this is where the ancients gathered from the 4th century BC onwards and where the crowd is almost full to capacity on this summer night. While other parts of the nation broil in alarming heat, here there is an airy mountain breeze and pin-drop silence as a production of Medea, by the German director Frank Castorf, plays out.
It is not what the traditional crowd is accustomed to: combining Euripides’s text with excerpts from Heiner Müller and Arthur Rimbaud, it features not one murderous mother in Medea, who kills her children as revenge against her unfaithful husband, Jason, but five actors (Stefania Goulioti, Sofia Kokkali, Maria Nafpliotou, Angeliki Papoulia, Evdokia Roumelioti) who appear simultaneously on stage as different versions of her.
