Agia Marina elementary school
August 7,8,9,10 – 21.15 hrs
“I cannot stand the chorus and those girls of tender ages
who sympathise with heroines in plays upon our stages!”
Leros Theatre Group presents the modern version of Medea written by Mentis Bostantzoglou (better known as Bost), at Agia Marina elementary school courtyard.
In his works, Bost (Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou 1918-1995), a prolific Greek political cartoonist, playwright, lyricist and painter, jumbles up various epochs, historical events and characters of different periods, which brings into his plays the elements of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Written in 1993 in 15-syllable iambic verse, this landmark of Greek drama is an explosive comedy about the (still) contemporary reality of Greece. Medea, Antigone, a fisherman, Jason, a nun, and a highly unusual chorus meet unexpectedly to dispel all our certainties, “to judge the judges, to trouble the critics, and to liberate the spectators”.
The tragic heroine does not kill her children out of amorous jealousy but out of her disappointment for their poor school performance and sinful lifestyles.
“The kids in school were bad in class among the worst of Greece’s
so every right the mother had to slaughter them to pieces
They went to school but didn’t care as if they were in China
The only thing they cared about was just the nun’s vagina”
The conclusive sonnet of the play is a comment on the motivation of child-slaughter: as they didn’t do well at school, taking interest in nothing but the love affair with the nun and the monk, their mother punished them by killing them.
Bost’s writing is demanding on actors because his heroes aren’t humans, they’re cartoons that you’ve got to make them human and that’s where the depth and seriousness of Bost’s writing lies. In essence, it’s concealed, because hiding behind each cartoon is a Greek presented in a surreal and irregular fashion, extracting the substance of a Greek and showing us what we don’t want to see. Actually it’s the transformation of Euripides ancient dramaturgy’s most tragic story to a modern parody.
