Ancient Drama in the Modern City: When tragedy walks among us
What would happen if Antigone stepped onto today’s barricades, facing prohibitions and repressive decrees?
What if Medea lived as a “foreigner” in an apartment in modern-day Athens?
What if Oedipus found himself at the center of a political scandal, chasing a truth that ultimately destroys him?
These are not academic questions. They form the heart of our new podcast series, “Ancient Drama in the Modern City” — a production by Medea Pictures and Dromos Theatre, supported by the MEDEA Theatre Group, written and directed by Emmanouil Mavros.
The Idea: Tragedy as a Tool, Not a Museum Exhibit
For far too many years, ancient tragedy has been treated as something distant — a genre we admire from afar or a text endlessly reshaped and adapted according to the whims of whoever comes along. Our starting point is the exact opposite. We believe that the great works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus are the sharpest tools we have to understand our world: power and its abuses, justice, migration, marginalization, and the violence that erupts when a society forgets its own humanity.
Each episode takes a masterpiece and confronts it with a contemporary dilemma. Through lively discussion, dramaturgical analysis, and theatrical readings of excerpts by actors from the MEDEA Theatre Group, we discover that the heroes of tragedy do not belong to the past. Their conflicts, passions, and questions regarding freedom and dignity remain deafeningly relevant. 5th-century BC Athens and today’s city share the same anxieties — only the stage setting changes.
Season 1: Six Tragedies, Six Questions
- Episode 1 — Antigone & Civil Disobedience
- Where does obedience to the law end, and where does individual conscience begin? Antigone stands up against Creon’s decree and lays the groundwork for an idea that extends to Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.: that disobedience to unjust laws can become a duty.
- Episode 2 — Medea & Fractured Identities
- Betrayal, the “foreigner,” and the violence of marginalization. Medea is doubly rejected — as a woman in a patriarchal society and as an immigrant without a safety net. Her tragedy asks how a society that strips individuals of their identity ends up birthing a monster it can no longer control.
- Episode 3 — Bacchae & Mass Hysteria
- The technocrat Pentheus versus the god Dionysus — rationalism versus the erotism of passion. We analyze the surge of fanaticism through fanatic armies (hooliganism), digital lynchings, and the collective need for release that no society, no matter how repressed, can suppress without eventual punishment.
- Episode 4 — Oedipus Rex & Political Blindness
- A leader embarks on a crusade against corruption without suspecting that he himself is its root cause. A political thriller about arrogance, fabricated narratives, and the price of a truth that cannot remain hidden forever.
- Episode 5 — Suppliants & The Refugee Issue
- Fifty women arrive by boat, holding olive branches and seeking asylum. Aeschylus sets up one of the greatest political dilemmas in world drama — landing directly on the borders of today’s Europe.
- Episode 6 — Oresteia & Justice
- From vigilante justice and mob rule to institutional law. The goddess Athena establishes the first court in history, and humanity…
Season 1 will be available on October 2nd 2026. Follow on Spotify, listen, and travel with us.
Language: Greek