Euripides’s play Medea has continued to fascinate and provoke ever since its first performance almost 2500 years ago. But what did that first performance look like, and how did it contribute to enabling the play’s endurance ever since? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Oliver Taplin, former Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, about why Medea’s debut at the City Dionysia festival in Athens in 431BCE, where it only came third, was so groundbreaking - and so shocking.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/medea-then-and-now