Sixteen girls of unimaginable beauty stand in two lines inside a light metal structure. Their faces are illuminated by the screens of their smartphones, to which their eyes are fixed. At the signal of a bank display, the girl whose turn has come steps forward to a tuning fork and strikes it with a lollipop, producing a sound. Text slowly scrolls down the screen—we hear it first in Russian, then in Kazakh:

my property is the visions of the slain

and the cries of the tortured are my possession

since I left my homeland, Colchis,

following your bloody trail and with the blood of those like me

into my new role of betrayal.

Some remember the production of Medea staged by Anatoly Vasiliev with the French actress Valérie Dréville. Most know Heiner Müller—the key playwright of postwar European theatre—through Kirill Serebrennikov’s recent premiere “Müller Machine”; some recall Dmitry Volkostrelov’s St. Petersburg production “Love Story”. That is almost the entire stage history of Müller in Russia. Meanwhile, in Almaty, Müller is being performed in the MEGA shopping mall, with a backdrop of a one-and-a-half-million-strong city stretching across floor-to-ceiling windows—and the local bohemia behaves as if this were perfectly ordinary.

Indeed, what’s so unusual about it? Müller in MEGA; models instead of actors; a metal structure instead of a set—which also functions as a musical instrument; and into the music performed by a chamber ensemble are woven recitative, the sound of the traditional kobyz, and the hum of electric motors.

Begenov reads Müller’s unfinished play as Medea’s monologue: betrayed by Jason, she transforms out of pain and shock into a machine—and finds salvation in this transformation, just as in ancient theatre she was saved from human retribution by the “deus ex machina”, the “god from the machine.” When the words in the performance come to an end, the musical machine takes over.