ante/medea Unspooled Theatre Collective

A play about Love, the destroyer.

As Medea and Jason welcome old friends into their home, forgotten tensions, repressed memories, and the spectres of bygone violence begin to haunt what should have been a joyful reunion. Their shared history is a minefield and it doesn’t help that Medea is freshly wounded at the hands of her husband, reeling from a betrayal their relationship may never recover from.

ante/medea is a fast-paced, gripping, one-act play centred on Ancient Greece’s most famous tragic heroine. Contemporary and psychological, it turns away from the spectacle of Medea’s slaughtered children and instead towards the identical wounds of love and violence. As four of the Argonauts reconnect in the
aftermath of a family tragedy, Medea finds herself forced to come to terms with the ultimate grief: things will never again be the way they once were.

ante/medea, from the team behind Melbourne Fringe 2022’s HAML3T, breathes intense, complicated life into the negative space between The Argonautica and Medea. This domestic drama questions whether it is possible to escape the gravitational pull of trauma and history, offering an intimate exploration of how the claustrophobic desires of the people around her can drive one woman to an act of infamous, unprecedented violence.