Zürcher Theater Spektakel

The South African director Brett Bailey evoked controversial reactions with his wildly eclectic show «House of the Holy Afro» at the 2008 festival. This year, we première his mis-en-scène of a radical Medea adaption by the young Dutch theatre writer Oscar van Woensel: Jason and his Argonauts gad about Africa as a marauding gang in search of sex, fun and money. Medea, an African princess bored with her isolated life, falls in love with the white adventurer. She runs away with him to Europe in hope of a modern life. But there is no room for foreigners in the promised land ... Bailey stages this passionate drama of love, exclusion and hatred as an aggressive urban music theatre interpreted by a South African ensemble, full of audacity and polemics and spiced with pop references. (esc)