Balancing mundane with mythic
The challenge for any actor performing one of Yiannis Ritsos’s dramatic monologues is to preserve the writer’s exquisite balance between the mundane and the mythic. Vassilis Papavassileiou’s rendition of «Eleni» for Theatro Technis leans more toward the everyday. His is one of two male versions of female roles in Ritsos monologues currently being staged in Athens. Christos Tsangas, who is playing the woman in «Moonlight Sonata» at the Eleftheri Ekfrasi theater, believes that the character’s gender matters little after a certain age and that the deeper human message can be conveyed by an actor of either sex. Actor-director Papavassileiou makes a larger claim in his program notes for «Eleni, » saying that performances of Ritsos’s female characters by women, «though brilliant, are relegated to the enclosed world of ‘psychological drama. ‘» Having said that, however, his own «Eleni» is mostly earthbound. Ritsos’s Eleni is an elderly woman contemplating her life, past and present, but she is also the Eleni, Helen of Troy, whose meditations on the vanity of human aspiration resonate far beyond the bounds of a single life. Papavassileiou’s Eleni is an ordinary middle-class woman whose memories of past conquests and statues in her likeness might belong to the realm of imagination. She bemoans the tedium of provincial life in Sparta compared with the thrills of Troy, but this Eleni never conjures up the Helen of myth and legend, or makes us see what Marlowe’s awestruck Dr Faustus called «the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. » Though one might quarrel with the interpretation, the performance is flawless: Papavassileiou’s masterly diction brings out every cadence of the verse, and his gestures are eloquent and sparing. The production uses music and clever stage business to interpolate short breaks into the monologue. «Eleni» is at Theatro Technis’s downstairs stage, 5 Pesmazoglou, tel 010.322.8706.
