I-ONE
by Ivan Vyrypaev

– WORLD PREMIERE–

The new work by Ivan Vyrypaev comes into focus through the directorial lens of Galin Stoev, a creator with a profound command of contemporary European theatre. Three actors from different countries converge at the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus, where Antigone Duchesne, Sofia Kokkali, and Karolina Rzepa share the leading role – forming from the outset a charged stage encounter between distinct performative lineages.

Drawing on both the form and the spirit of the ancient tragic tradition, Medea resurfaces here as a new tragedy for the twenty-first century. Stoev’s staging tests the limits of myth while grappling with some of the most fragile materials of our time: technology, the notion of selfhood, and the shifting ground of identity.

Written in English, the work is international by design, both in intention and its dramaturgical DNA. It binds the archetypal motifs of ancient Greek tragedy to contemporary philosophical inquiry, futuristic stage aesthetics, and an urgent existential probing of responsibility, agency, and the thresholds of human consciousness.

The story transports us to a dystopian future – America in 2050 – where the heroine confronts not only guilt, violence, and the fracture of her identity, but also a new form of technological fate. Judith commits the double murder of her adopted son and his French tutor – who is also her husband’s lover – in an act of intimate vengeance that reverberates as a modern echo of Euripides’ Medea, propelling events toward irreversible consequences. Indicted and subjected to an experimental “conversion therapy,” she undergoes implantation with I-ONE, a neural agent designed to recalibrate criminal behaviour. Υet a technical malfunction erases her memory and consciousness, stripping her of any stable sense of self. Here, the divine machinery of tragedy is transfigured into technological destiny: the implant monitors, analyses, and intervenes in Judith’s mind, functioning as a contemporary analogue to the Chorus of ancient drama. In this production, Stoev approaches technology not as a promise of redemption, but as a mirror held up to the human condition, one that reopens, with unsettling clarity, the question: what remains when the “I” is no longer a certainty?