How do we cope with the loss of a loved one? Do the rituals of mourning help? And is there any prospect of an afterlife? These questions were buzzing in my brain after seeing a wordless 70-minute show, Goodbye, Lindita, in a converted factory in Athens. Conceived and directed by Mario Banushi, the 24-year-old son of Albanian immigrants, the production was part of a five-day showcase organised by the National Theatre of Greece and I felt I was witnessing the emergence of an exciting new talent.
Banushi’s play is highly personal: it was prompted by the image of his dead stepmother “surrounded by people saying goodbye” and by the death of his father three days later. But what we see on stage is a strange mixture of the mundane and surreal.
The show starts with relatives tidying up old clothes while vacantly watching television. A chest of drawers then unfolds to reveal the stretched-out figure of a naked female corpse. The body is ceremonially bathed, adorned in a mask and sumptuous robes and placed on a flower-festooned bier. Meanwhile, the relatives, predominantly female, silently gather and slowly start to judder, shake and, in one extreme case, take balletic flight through an open window.
Grief has many different forms but what I took from the show was the idea that it will inevitably pierce the elaborate rituals that accompany death. At times I was reminded of the hyperrealism of the Bavarian dramatist, Franz Xaver Kroetz: Banushi makes great play of the way that families use telly-watching to nullify their emotions. At other moments Magritte came to mind: a door suddenly turns into a coffin, an arm miraculously appears from a wall as if the dead reach out to the living. We even get a strange final image of a corpse emerging from a dark tunnel to be greeted by a welcoming maternal figure.
How Banushi will develop remains to be seen but, since the Athens showcase was visited by 30 directors from all over Europe, my guess is that his work will soon be seen on the festival circuit. I only hope Britain doesn’t miss out.
If Athenian work does travel, it will fulfil the showcase’s basic aim. As Yannis Moschos, the artistic director of the National Theatre, told me: “We lack visibility abroad.” To rectify that, the National arranged a programme of seven productions spread over their two theatres. But the whole project was endangered by what is known locally as “the squat”. On 5 February the National Theatre was occupied by more than 200 drama students and a few days later its second house, the Rex, was similarly taken over. The cause was a government edict that would, in effect, devalue the degrees issued by the schools of theatre, dance, cinema and music and reduce them to the level of high-school diplomas: a decision that caused widespread outrage.
“The squat,” says Moschos, “was a symbolic gesture but one which we at the National supported. We also didn’t do anything brutal like calling in the police. But, although the squat lasted 50 days and only ended because of the hope a forthcoming election will bring change, it inevitably affected our programme. Some shows had to close, others were delayed and we had to rehearse in rented spaces.”
Moschos ruefully admits that by the end of the squat he was starting to lose patience, but he is a genial figure who has broken convention in many ways. He is the first artistic director of the National to be chosen by a committee of theatre people rather than a government minister. He is the first director to assign a different policy to the five stages in the National’s two houses. He also told me he is the first director in Greek theatre to come out as gay. For all his notable firsts, he still has to battle with an age-old problem confronting the National: that its subsidy has remained stubbornly at €6m for most of the last decade.
Moschos admits that he will have to spend much of the 18 months remaining on his contract fundraising. But he plans to stage Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance and during my stay I saw his production (surtitled in English like everything I watched) of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. Premiering in 1987, it has long been overshadowed by Angels in America but this revival makes a good case for it.
Kushner shows how a circle of Berlin friends disintegrates during the rise of nazism in 1932-33. But, while Kushner vividly shows how political principles are overcome by personal survival, one line resonates deeply: a female artist’s cry that “The dreams of the left are always beautiful.” What is more debatable is Kushner’s determination to spell out the play’s contemporary parallels. Originally Kushner compared 1930s Germany to the world of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, lately, he has changed that to Donald Trump. Moschos, however, has excised those references, allowed us to draw our own conclusions and the work is all the stronger for it.
I saw two other National Theatre productions, albeit in unfinished form. A Night at Epidaurus, directed by Nikos Karathanos and staged at the Irene Papas School of Athens, was a madcap affair about the aftermath of a performance at Greece’s classical theatre. Traditionally in the play everyone retires to a legendary taverna and we witness the orgy of self-congratulation and recrimination that breaks out among the actors. The play is like an Aristophanic version of Hellzapoppin but, while clearly intended for local consumption, I was amused by lines such as: “The Greek audience wants a Greek director, not a foreign one.”
On the National’s main stage, I also saw two scenes from a forthcoming production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Dimitris Karantzas. What struck me forcibly was the use of simultaneous action. While the lovers are protesting their passion on the balcony, below them we witness the fag-end of the Capulet ball which is a morally decadent affair ending in the savage kicking of a drag performer clad in white balloons. At the same time we see Friar Laurence in his cell serenely preparing his potions. Given that Romeo is here a black-clad figure in modern dress with a visible resemblance to Hamlet, I assume the point is to contrast youthful anguish with the corruption and decay of the surrounding society.
There is clearly a fascination in Athenian theatre with depravity. Visitors to the National Theatre showcase were also invited to see productions at Onassis Stegi: a vast, lavishly endowed arts centre with a bias towards innovation. I hurried there to catch a new version of Crime and Punishment since it was directed and co-adapted by Vasilis Bisbikis and, on a previous visit, I had been hugely impressed by his Of Mice and Men.
That was staged on a minimal budget in an old machine-shop. Crime and Punishment, however, is a big-budget show and a deep disappointment. Bisbikis has set Dostoevsky’s story in modern Athens: a world of sex parlours, louche bars and gambling dens. Even the old woman murdered by the hero, an ex law-student called Mikhail, is a sexually voracious loan shark who is not so much a pawnbroker as a porn-broker. I thought Bisbikis’s portrait of capitalist depravity somewhat exaggerated until I noticed, opposite the eminently respectable Onassis Stegi, three venues entitled Kinky Opera, Dream Girls Bar (“Everything you want right now”) and Casa Babylon strip club.
But while Bisbikis uses every resource available to show Athens as a sink of iniquity, he rarely takes us inside the mind of his protagonist. The only scenes that fully worked were those between Mikhail and the detective, Porfiry, played by Bisbikis himself in padded clothes that made him resemble Orson Welles’s cop in Touch of Evil.
I came away from Athens struck by the sheer quantity of theatre available – this week alone there are 284 shows on offer – as well as by the quality of the acting and the capacity of the National Theatre to surmount the recent crisis. But as Moschos reminded me there is still much work to be done: the National urgently needs more money, more new writing and, not least, more female directors.
One of its biggest recent hits, a stage version of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, was the work of a woman, Amalia Bennett, but she happens to be a long-term British expat. The National Theatre, Moschos admits, is “traditionally conservative” but he is keen to make it a home not just for the great classics but for modern drama unfamiliar to Greek audiences and for radical experiment. All I can say is that if he can find more work of the calibre of Banushi’s Goodbye, Lindita, he stands a fair chance of success.
• Michael Billington’s visit was made possible by the National Theatre of Greece, through funds from the EU’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
