For this year's festival contribution by Staatstheater Augsburg, Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner are exploring Heiner Müller's "Medeamaterial". They are thus continuing their intensive exploration of the second great German playwright of the 20th century, which began in 2020 with the guest performance of "Der Auftrag" and a series of radio plays. Due to the coronavirus, there will unfortunately not be a stage production this year. Instead, the people involved in the production - based on the digital online creation process - are working together to create an associative, musical, visual video centered around one of the most famous female characters in literary history. First performed in Bochum in 1983, the triptych "Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten" is not a classical play, but a post-dramatic text collage.
In the Augsburg digital version, the production team concentrates primarily on Müller's condensation of the ancient myth of Medea - "material" in the truest sense of the word, which virtually demands a decidedly visual-artistic approach.
Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner approach the text via a strongly musically grounded form that focuses on the female aspect of the archetypal female figure Medea, who - victim and perpetrator in equal measure - interrupts the history of violence with violence.

Director: Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner
Stage: Maximilian Lindner, Costumes: Laurant Pellissier, Composition: Lila-Zoé Krauß, Helena Ratka, Dramaturgy: Lutz Keßler
With: Elif Esmen, Natalie Hünig, Christina Jung
Live music: Lila-Zoé Krauß, Helena Ratka
Publishing rights: Henschel Schauspiel
Photo: Jan-Pieter Fuhr

Press comment:
"Heiner Müller has combined the classic Medea tragedy with dreams and reflections on the present. Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner distil this into a fascinating concentrate that offers a haunting experience in its fusion of theater performance, film and music and plenty of food for thought in its unbridled frenzy of associations." Donaukurier