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Medea, a performance history

First performed nearly 2,500 years ago, and continually reinvented since, Medea remains one of the most controversial female characters in the history of theatre. 

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.

Download options

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

For Apple users, the ebook can also be dowloaded in three smaller instalments, each comprised of two related chapters.

A fan of five illustrated playing cards, each denoting a chapter of the Medea ebook
Medea chapter-navigation cards
Illustrator Thom Cuschieri created navigational images in the style of playing cards, for each of the ebook's six chapters: Black Sea; Empire; Witch; Woman; Mind, and Performer.

Choose your own path...

The ebook explores the performance history of Euripides' Medea through six 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 chapters 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.

Screenshot of a page of the interactive Medea ebook showing a statue of medea, an interactive map, a video still and audio clip alongside a photograph of actor Helen McRory in the role of Medea
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

For a further look inside the Medea ebook, see the slideshow at the top of its APGRD Publications page.

Download links

The next APGRD ebook

An illustrated card, numbered III with 'Homecoming' written across the bottom; the image shows a man arriving by chariot and a waiting figure in the background at the top of some steps carpeted in red.

Our second interactive/multimedia ebook focusses on the performance history of Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

Agamemnon occupies a unique position in theatre history: one of the oldest surviving plays from antiquity, it is the first play in the only surviving example of an ancient Greek trilogy (the Oresteia). Our second ebook again uses digitised archive items and bespoke digital material to explore the tragedy's performance history.