Heiner Müller’s Medea: towards a paradigm for the contemporary Gothic anatomy

Abstract

Heiner Müller (1929–96) is arguably Germany’s leading contemporary (post-Brecht) dramatist and a major figure of the international post-modernist avant-garde. With a notable and lasting output of creative work himself, his collaborations were extensive, from Brecht of course to perhaps, most famously, Robert Wilson in the CIVIL warS project; conversely, his work has inspired wide-ranging responses, including an opera by Wolfgang Rihm and a recording by Einstürzende Neubauten, a gripping video-film by Dominik Barbier of the Paris-based Fearless Evil Productions, and Andrzej Wirth’s Brecht/Müller/ Wilson ‘Interface’. His creative work for the theatre stretches from the ‘Production Plays’ of the 1950s through the reworkings (‘copies’) of other people’s plays (including the two Shakespeare Factory volumes) of the 1970s to perhaps his most familiar plays in the Anglophonic world: Hamlet-machine (1977) and Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts (1982), to which I shall later return.

Medea that ungracious Imp, King Aetas wicked chylde, Yet hath not from our careful realme her lingring foote exilde. Som naughty drift she goes about, her knacks of old we kno, Her jugling arts, her harming hands are known wel long ago. From whom will shee withhold her harme? whom will this cruel beast Permit to live, from perrill free, in quietnesse and rest?

(Seneca, Medea, in the ‘Tudor translation’ of John Studley)