CULTURE

After lauded inaugural opera, it’s time for theater at Athens Festival

Following the National Opera’s production of «Carmen,» which inaugurated this year’s Athens Festival, it is now time for theater. Until Friday, the Scholeion on Pireos Street is showing Marivaux’s «L’heureux stratagem,» a production directed by Nikos Hadzopoulos. The new stage of the Pireos 260 theater is showing Robert Thomas’s «Eight Women» (performed by eight men) until tomorrow and the other stage of the same venue is presenting the Pyotr Fomenko Theatre-Atelier in the first part of Leon Tolstoy’s «War and Peace,» also through tomorrow. «L’heureux stratagem,» a classic piece of Marivaux comedy, was fortunate to have fallen into the hands of Hadzopoulos, an adept director and translator who knows how to shed light on the ins and outs of a situation, give it color and tone and read between the lines – skills that are necessary when handling the often-misconstrued playwright. Marivaux’s sophisticated language, a tool of seduction, subterfuge, hidden emotions and passions but also one of a lurking brutality that reveals itself through the fine manners and courtesy of the playwright’s characters, has been deftly transported to a timeless present by the director and his A-list cast: Anna Mascha, Maria Kehagioglou and Despina Droutsi – ta virulent female trio – and Yiannis Dalianis, Costas Berokopoulos and Dimosthenis Eleftheriadis, a no less-dangerous male ensemble. A play that ran for several seasons in the past on various stages in the Greek capital and which later also became a screen classic with a stellar cast, Thomas’s «Huit femmes» (Eight Women) has been given an interesting new twist by Nikos Karathanos, who had the igneous idea of casting eight men, including himself, in the eight female roles. The other stage of Pireos 260 presents one of Russia’s most vibrant theater ensembles, that of Pyotr Fomenko, a great stage director and legendary tutor. «War and Peace» Fomenko-style has received rave reviews and awards internationally. The play was developed after exhaustive research into Tolstoy’s classic, after which Fomenko decided to focus only on the first part of the first volume. For information and tickets, tel 210.327.2000, or log on to www.greekfestival.gr.

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