Your production of “Medea” had its world premiere in Japan in 1999. What did you want to say then through that work?
The Kosovo war was going on and in March 1999 NATO warplanes struck [the former] Yugoslavia. Then in that summer we started to create “Medea”. I didn’t understand why NATO intervened in the war, or whether it was actually the right thing to do or not. So in fact, just my uncomfortable feeling against the war became a huge motive to create “Medea”.
Regarding the intervention, I felt that Western rationalists assessed things purely using their own logic and values, and they wanted the people most directly affected — who were implicitly regarded as inferior — to rise to the same level as themselves.
I had that kind of impression in my head while we were creating “Medea”, and reading Euripides’s eponymous tragedy back then I felt that in Ancient Greece, and especially Athens, people assumed and really believed they were more rational and advanced than those in any other country.
In my view, Ancient Greeks considered the Medea of their mythology inferior to them in three respects.
The first of those was in terms of “rational consideration”. In the play [first performed in 431 BC], it is proposed that Greeks consider things rationally, whereas Asian Medea [born in Colchis on the eastern Black Sea coast] does not. Furthermore, the Ancient Greeks view Medea as inferior because she is a “woman”, since Ancient Greek democracy was the sole preserve of men. The reason for this was because only men could participate in war as soldiers.
In Japan also, when the Meiji Era [1868–1912] began, the new government advocated “equality of the people of all classes” — however equality applied only to people who joined the army under the national policy of “increasing the wealth and military of the nation”. So, whether peasant or samurai, people were judged equally as being useful or not useful in a military force. Hence the ways of thinking in both the Meiji Era, that “all citizens are equal within the military”, and in Ancient Greece’s “democracy by men” are very similar.
The second point is “universality.” Words are separate from bodies, so a law made or written yesterday will itself not change today. On the other hand, a body will change every moment. The environment affects the body, and as a result a person’s judgment may change due to the body’s condition. Nevertheless, the Ancient Greeks thought that such physical, changeable politics was not civilized.
In the mythological character of Medea they saw an “Asian woman”, and a sorceress and “pharmakis” who could use incantations. But as such things belonged to a world in which rational words couldn’t work, in the Ancient Greeks’ high-level civilization they believed it was not necessary. Medea, though, could actually use incantation effectively, and her incantational poison had an important role in the play. So, from their view of incantation, we can appreciate the Ancient Greeks’ fear of Medea. That fear came from the idea that they had already cast away incantation, or thought they had overcome it, yet it still had an extraordinary power. In other words, I think I can call that fear a “complex”.
I think the term “complex” would apply to Japanese in the Meiji Era, too. At that time Japan had largely succeeded in modernizing before others in Asia, but it had a complex about other Asian countries which might have retained powers that directly connect to the origins or roots of human life. For example, people know that age-old Asian traditional medical treatments may sometimes cure illnesses that can’t be cured with Western medicine. As with this example, I think the Ancient Greeks’ feeling was very close to Japanese people’s feeling at that time.
So, when I read Euripides’s “Medea” while NATO was intervening in the war in Kosovo, I had an idea that “Medea” was a story relating to Japan — which is why I changed its setting to wartime Japan.
You presented “Medea” at the Coronet Theatre in London in 2025, a long time after the previous performance. Did you make any new discovery from that staging?
It was the first time in 12 years that I’d done “Medea”, but I almost didn’t make any changes to my direction. My uncomfortable feeling about the Kosovo war is now connecting with my feeling about the war in Ukraine. Quite apart from matters of right or not right, there is the feeling, widespread in many places in the world, that some nations are treated as inferior — and that causes many problems today.
However, when we began the rehearsals, an entirely different idea occurred to me and to the actors. That was “growing old”. It’s something all human beings share, of course, since everyone grows older. Actually, the theme most common to all would probably be “death”, but people can easily forget death in their daily lives. On the other hand, they’re always feeling they are “growing old”, and I have come to believe there is no other genre able to deal with “growing old” more appropriately than theatre.
We used the same text in 2025 as we used in 1999. However, we had become older, of course. Thanks to being older, relationships between people, power balances among a group, the flow of energy and the way of spaces taking shape is all changing. I believe that “myself” appears from relationships between other people from which, inevitably, I myself will naturally transfigure. I thought then that was a fascinating and special thing about theatre: how it can vividly reveal changing human nature.
Of course, such discoveries come from the experience of us re-running the same production — even more so as this was the first performance in 12 years.
I would also like to say that “Medea” made us realize theatre’s particular fascination because the play has incredible universality. Although it was written 2,500 years ago, the words still have strong meaning. I wrote and re-edited the text 27 years ago and have not changed that at all. So, while relationships between people in a group, and individuals’ physical selves change all the time, the play “Medea” showed us that its words did not change through the ages.
Message from Artists
When I visited museums in Athens, I was so surprised that most Greek sculptures made before the era of Ancient Greek art we studied at school were of women, and there were few of men.
After I saw those women featured in sculptures, I read Euripides’s “Medea” written around 500 BC, and then I understood the Ancient Greek men’s complex against women. Those men were proud of themselves for making a male-ruled society due to their advance after the society women had ruled till quite recently. Actually, it wasn’t really “recently”, as it probably took hundreds of years, but at least to those men’s sensitivities it felt like “recently”. That’s why Ancient Greek tragedy is loved and performed all over the world today, even though the tragedies were written and made exclusively by men.
Miyagi Satoshi
Born in Tokyo in 1959, after studying aesthetics at Tokyo University under Odashima Yushi, Watanabe Moriaki and Hidaka Hachiro, he founded the KU NA’ UKA theatre company in 1990 and soon began staging plays overseas as well as in Japan. As a result, Miyagi’s work — in which he often fuses contemporary textual interpretations with physical techniques and patterns of Asian theatre — has long been acclaimed both at home and far beyond. Indeed, in 2004 he received the 3rd Asahi Performing Arts Award, and the next year the 2nd Asahi Beer Art Award. Since taking up his position with SPAC in April 2007, Miyagi has staged many of his own works — including “Medea”, the Hindu epic “Mahabharata”, and “Peer Gynt” — and has invited artists from abroad to present pieces casting a keen eye on the modern world as they see it. In line with his aim to make theatre “a window to the world,” he has also started a new SPAC-based project aimed at the youth of Shizuoka. In 2014, Miyagi was invited to the Festival d’Avignon, where he received excellent reviews for his open-air version of the Hindu epic “Mahabharata” staged in La Carrière de Bourbon. Following that landmark achievement, the festival extended the honor of inviting Miyagi to present a Buddhist interpretation he created of the ancient Greek mythological tragedy “Antigone” as its super-prestigious opening program for 2017. On that occasion, which was the first time an Asian play had ever been selected to launch the festival, Miyagi’s exalted “stage” was the open-air Cour d’honneur du Palais des papes (the Honor Court of the Palace of Popes). By the play’s end, those towering medieval stone walls were ringing out with long and splendid standing ovations welcoming the work’s director and creator along with SPAC’s actors and staff — while more than 60 European media all gave great reviews. In 2018, he received the 68th Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize of Drama. Also he recieved “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” from the Ministry of Culture of France in 2018.
