“I’m working on my next shots,” Brecht wrote to Mr. Keuner, and the phrase was one of the phrases used by German director Frank Castorf at today’s press conference for Medea, which he is to stage as part of his festival. Athens-Epidavros in the ancient theater of Epidaurus. The new production of the Festival is a continuation of the cycle of orders for ancient works to leading European directors, which began in 2021, as for Castorf, he comes to Epidaurus for the first time.

“The world is often ugly. We humans strive for excellence. It is this desire that we call rebellion. She is a woman – Medea, who, outside the social boundaries of her time, leaves behind a world on fire and ascends to heaven in a golden chariot. The 70-year-old European theater intellectual, who for 25 years directed the historic Berlin theater group Volksbein, which has been churning out “German style” since the 1990s, prefers not to explain his work. But he gives rise to thoughts that become possible actions, and this is his theater, his path.

“Maybe all this work is worth it, maybe it’s wasted,” Castorf boldly says of the upcoming download, and by association he recalls the idealistic delusions of Brecht’s Mr. Keuner. In the same way – “through the conscious and the unconscious,” as he explains – but also from the vast library of his mind, he extracts ideas and texts that can be used as dramatic material for the play.

“Medea is the reason we are here,” he comments, and describes the multifaceted world that – with theatrical, historical, psychological, literary, sociological, political connections and correspondences – will eventually become the world of Medea. “I’m a violent pacifist,” he adds, referring to his constant desire to take apart his material and then create a new whole – unconventional, dynamic, ready to explode.

Will we see “Medea” by Euripides in Epidaurus? We will see Medea by Castorf. The final text of the performance, based on an ancient drama, is in the process of being formed, a puzzle, as the actors say, in which they themselves participate, adding pieces, reacting to its texts and thoughts. Preparation, we are told, takes place in a mode of great freedom, which is somehow “organized” by the director. In the discussion that continues between the director and the Greek group of actors – 5 women will play Medea, and two men are still in the group – enter the French poet Rimbaud and theater figure Heiner Miller, with whom Castorff has an eclectic affinity. Three of his text-essays about Medea are used in the performance: “Almost Rimagmeni”, “Median Material” and “Landscape with Argonauts”.

“Goethe said,” Castorf comments, “that the myths of Greek antiquity are exhausted because over the centuries everyone has adapted them. It is like the soil that is cultivated over and over again and which does not have time to be reborn. But Euripides is as important as a sphere floating in a sea of ​​mercury. No matter how hard you try to sink it, it will always float to the surface.”

The show will be presented July 21-22.