Letter from Thessaloniki

Society is a stage

By Spyros Payiatakis

Yesterday, before theater shows opened for the night, audiences in Greece were invited to share French avant-garde’s director Ariane Mnouchkine’s reflections on theater and international harmony. Tens of thousands of spectators all over the world listened — in over 20 languages — to what is known as the International Message. 

Since 1961, March 27 is celebrated as World Theater Day — a special event organized by the International Theater Institute Secretariat at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. This is an occasion for theater people and show enthusiasts to honor the power of the performing arts and the infinite possibilities that theater has acquired in our 21st century.

Now, contemplating my many years as a theater critic at Kathimerini and Apoyevmatini, I cannot repeat enough how sometimes one gets it hopelessly wrong. Only (!) some 20 years ago I recall writing of a crisis in art and culture in the “money-orientated world of television and commercial art.” 

What an idiot I must have made of myself! All those theater halls that at the time were withdrawing into the neglected corners of Athens and Thessaloniki are now flourishing. Most importantly, the stage work in Greece is now really more diverse than I had predicted. And you can get a sense of the range of Greek theater just by going through listings pages of any newspaper.

Even in Thessaloniki, which has never really been a particularly special place for the theater, things have changed dramatically. New theatrical movements were nativist and poetic, as with groups such as the Experimental group of the Theatro Technis, Aktis Aeliou and Nees Morfes which culminated in the boisterous, unsettling works that the theater lover can see in New York, London or Berlin.

Still the more academic-minded National Theater of Northern Greece brimmed over this season with more or less outstanding productions of more or less outstanding plays:

There were happy rediscoveries of plays from the 1920s and 1930s, such as Angelos Terzakis’s “Emperor Michail” with a dazzling Nonika Galinea as the Empress Zoe, and “Maroula’s Lot” by Dimitris Koromilas.

Directed by Sotiris Hatzakis, “Ouzeri Tsitsanis — Pavlou Mela 22” by local playwright Giorgos Skabardonis, proved to be a vital piece of reportage, based on the dismal life in Thessaloniki during the first months of the German occupation in 1943, just before the city’s Jews are persecuted. Folk musician Vassilis Tsitsanis, 28 years old at the time, composed some of his best songs for the play.

Even what has often been called one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, “All’s Well That Ends Well,” staged by Giorgos Mihailidis, is still playing to full houses at the Vassiliko.

“Henceforward” by British playwright Alan Aykbourn — written in the 1980s but with still-valid futuristic problems of robots, riots and alienation — is a hit, thanks mainly to the young leading couple, Yiannis Tsortekis and Dimitra Matsouka. It’s just another case where the profusion of new English dramatists has slowly hardened into a routine, co-opted by a mixed system of commercialism and public funding.

There are voices in the city and articles in the press insisting that this seems to be the philosophy of the new artistic direction of the second-state stage in Greece that tends to discourage excitement and risk.

In “Amazing Thailand,” the latest Greek premiere, directed by Lenos Christidis and produced by Peris Mihailidis, two lads escape from the jungles of the modern Greek city to the jungles of Thailand, only to be followed by worse: by their unsupportable nouveau-riche family that makes both most unhappy.

Sure enough, we know that we are all unhappy with the current state of our society and theater is a microcosm of what we imagine society to be.

To celebrate more concretely this year’s International Theater Day on Thursday, March 31, there will be complementary free tickets for three Athens Theaters: Theatro Technis, the National Opera and the Kivotos Theater.

So, if theater does not bore you, go on and grab the chance. Since I personally go almost every night to see a play, people often want to know how I retain my noticeable fervor. The short Epicurean answer is that whoever is bored with theater is bored with life. As long as there are people in a place, the theater will exist. The more the Internet locks people into their computer cubicles, the more the urge for three-dimensional contact with others will strike them.

And as long as we live in a modern society so full of drug culture, rock music, football hysteria, sex and violence, we will no doubt have no difficulty finding recognizable analogues with Euripides’ “Bacchae.” Not to mention all those other plays that belong to our cultural heritage. Because theater as we still understand it was invented in classical Athens, as the head of the family in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” propagates so well.