Medea, a performance history

First performed nearly 2,500 years ago, and continually reinvented since, Medea remains the most controversial yet alluring female role in the history of theatre worldwide.

The APGRD's first multimedia/interactive ebook uses photographs, illustrations, film clips, bespoke interviews, and unique digital objects to tell the story of a play that has inspired countless interpretations, onstage and onscreen, in dance, drama and opera across the globe from antiquity to the present.

The complete ebook is free download as either an Apple Book or as an EPUB3 version which, due to the limitations of the software, has fewer interactive features than the iBook but should be compatible with most standard ebook-readers. For Apple users, the ebook can also be dowloaded in three smaller instalments, comprised of two related chapters.

Our thanks to Chris Jennings for converting our iBook into an EPUB.

Inside the ebook

The eBooks are filled with audio and video interviews with actors and scholars, digital maps and images, as well as digitised material from the APGRD's archive collections

A fan of five illustrated playing cards, each denoting a chapter of the Medea ebook

Medea chapter cards

Illustrator Thom Cuschieri created navigational images, in the style of playing cards, for each of the ebook's six chapters

Choose your own path...

The ebook explores the performance history of Medea through five thematic chapters. The book can be read linearly but each chapter is self-contained, and hyperlinks are woven throughout the book, allowing readers to jump across via related content.

The first chapter, Black Sea, explores Medea’s roots and backstory, and how these have been used in the theatre to challenge perceptions of her as an infamous child-killer; the second chapter, Empire, looks at the ways in which Medea’s story has been read as part of Europe's colonial history, and how Medea’s position as an exiled immigrant has made her a symbol of ethnic persecution and racial oppression.

The third chapter, Witch, investigates the way in which, from the sixteenth century onwards, productions have explored Medea’s divine ancestry and her links to magic and witchcraft, not only as a source of personal power but also as a site of female persecution; the fourth chapter, Woman, focuses on productions that have sought to explore the rights, roles and restrictions of women in society, interrogate what it means to be female, and consider how Medea speaks to notions of ‘female transgression’.

The fifth chapter, Mind, asks whether Medea’s murder of her own children is an act of insanity, frenzy, or calculated brutality? What does it cost an actor to perform such a role? and how have different productions tried to stage the controversial and contested issue of Medea’s mental state? The final chapter, Performer, explores the ways in which Euripides’ Medea, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a consummate performer within her own play, inhabiting numerous disparate roles through the course of the tragedy. Like Hamlet, the role is a star-vehicle for actors, and our ebook concludes with a chronological image gallery offering a “visual roll-call” of actors who have come to define the role of Medea.