Medea

The name Medea easily evokes the image of a screaming monster-murderer from Antiquity. But the truth is that Euripides brings Medea's experience uncomfortably close to each of us. His Medea is a very real woman who faces an ordeal too great for her. She fears she will suffer total humiliation, which for her is tantamount to erasure. Her solution is extreme, but far from unheard of in the modern world. We think that what she does is extraordinarily emotional and irrational, but in fact, her terrifying act is the result of iron logic. Perhaps her story is also a timely warning to us, inhabitants of a world increasingly obsessed with the efficiency of algorithms and artificial intelligence, that we must at all costs preserve our sound reason and ordinary decency. Because logic is a good servant, but a bad master. *The seats for the performance are standing, and the audience is located on the stage itself, while the actors perform among them. Declan Donnellan is a world-renowned theater director, artistic director of the British company "Cheek by Jowl," which he founded together with set designer Nick Ormerod in 1981. Their landmark productions have been presented in more than 50 countries, exerting a huge influence on the development of theatrical language and audience perception worldwide. Actors, including Adrian Lester, Tom Hiddleston, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Gwendoline Christie, and Matthew Macfadyen, developed their talent working with "Cheek by Jowl" at the beginning of their careers. The authors with whom the company mainly deals are European classics, with Shakespeare being among the most frequently staged. They stage French classics Corneille and Racine, as well as names such as A. de Musset, A.P. Chekhov, Alexei Pushkin, Alexander Ostrovsky, Calderón, Sophocles, Lessing, etc. International recognition of the significance of "Cheek by Jowl" includes numerous theater awards such as the "Laurence Olivier," the "Golden Lion" (2016) from Venice for lifetime achievement, and the International "Stanislavski" Award, awarded in 2018 to Declan Donnellan for outstanding contribution to the development of world theater. Together with Nick Ormerod as artistic directors, they were honored with the Order of the British Empire. Cheek by Jowl visited Bulgaria for the first time in 1987 with the play "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, which was performed in Sofia and Plovdiv. In 1994, their production of "As You Like It" with Adrian Lester was presented at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre, and in 2023, their performance "Life is a Dream" by Pedro Calderón de la Barca visited the Grand Stage. "Grand Prix" Award for Best Performance from the International Theater Festival "Skupi" in Skopje, North Macedonia. Nomination for the IKAR Award for Leading Female Role for RADINA KURDZHILOVA for Medea