Watching this production, purged both of correspondences to life and correspondences to language (which brings it close to Vasilyev’s Medea), I’m becoming aware of the fact that the most terrifying in Medea is that very tragic recognition. In Evgenia Safonova’s production you do recognize, but not a face or a character, – no, you recognize all the horror, all the fury of Medea, you recognize and feel them in your own body.

Oksana Kushlyaeva, St. Petersburg Theatre Magazine

The main means of expression in this austere, modernist in its spirit production, created according to the logic of deduction, is the word, intoned by the actor. The tragedy of St. Petersburg Medea is born not even from the spirit of music, but from the sound аs it is – from the deep, visceral note, produced by the actor’s entire body. From the exploding, tormenting for the ear phonemes, the disharmony of which is for a long time resonating in the pauses, stitching together the fabric of the performance.

Dmitry Renansky, Kommersant

The loss of identity is not only about Medea. The protagonist of Euripides accuses her unfaithful husband of her own crimes, and the director together with the video artist find a simple and expressive equivalent of ancient curses: close-ups of Medea’s and Jason’s faces, stretched across the full height of the screen panels, suddenly start approaching, blurring. Then, overlapping and transforming, they coincide in a double composition. Who is this “persona”? It’s no longer Medea and Jason, a woman and a man, a mother-killer and a father-betrayer, but all of them together – criminal, guilty, and abandoned. Guilt and crime is the classical heritage; abandonment is the gift of modernity.

Medea, approaching the tragic denouement, more and more forgets who she is. Jason, blended with her to the point of indiscernibility, in an attempt to liberate himself seems to be trying to define who he is for the first time.

Lilia Shitenburg, Colta

On the small stage of the Lensovet Theatre, Safonova builds a lily-white pavilion with moveable shutters-screens: opening in various combinations, they frame the stage picture, focusing on closeups of actors, and at the end of the episodes, measured by the syncopes of the stroboscope, they thunderously clash with each other. In such moments it seems that one may hear the work of the mechanism of destiny – common for all the eras and times.

Dmitry Renansky, Kommersant

It is the omnipresent ability of the sound which becomes the main source of discomfort for the audience, that the impact of Medea is built upon. A woman in black, with a slightly asymmetric face, with feet, stubbornly spread apart, seems to be growing out of the stage. The actress breaks words into syllables, destroys logical stresses, puts full stops, where they were not implied at all. The speech is dominated by voiceless consonants. The voice reminds either of growl or birds scream. Actors, installed in space, send out their monologues to the auditorium. The energy of action is born from their stasis.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Theatre

At the culminant point of the production the silent silhouettes, having descended from Paul Cezanne’s Portrait of the Artist’s Son, watch how one of the countless apocalypses of the 20th century is dissolving on the video backdrop in a ghostly glitch: the messengers of the long disappeared wholesome world are observing its woeful future, at the same time closely looking at our present.

Dmitry Renansky, Kommersant

The awareness of the fact that I, an audience member of the postmodern era, in the snowy country of the Hyperboreans, thousands years after the creation of the oldest ancient Greek drama, am watching its brand new interpretation on theatre stage, makes me tremble. It seems that Time itself is among the audience, watching the new Medea. The duration of the performance is only an hour and half, but during this short period of time a catastrophe, physically sensed by everyone in attendance, takes place here.

Review of an audience member