Playing Dead: The Post-Tragic Impact of Child Actors in Simon Stone’s (2020) and Anne-Louise Sarks and Kate Mulvany’s (2012) Medea

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This article examines two adaptations of Euripides’ Medea by Australian-born directors/playwrights Simon Stone (2020) and Anne-Louise Sarks with Kate Mulvany (2012). With a focus on the child actors who played Medea’s sons in each production, the article examines the ways in which their performances contributed to the affective impact of each work. Emphasising the modalities employed by each director to transpose the tragedy for the contemporary theatre stage, particularly providing the child characters with greater prominence in their respective versions than Euripides did, the article argues that the particularly ‘realistic’ performances of the children at once ruptured Medea as a tragedy while accelerating its post-tragic force in a contemporary theatre context. The realism of the children’s performances operated as the driving force behind making the tragic lynchpin of the play – their murders – all the more intensely felt. Case studies of each production are provided while situating these works within the broader contexts of children in performance for adult audiences in contemporary theatre.