A giant screen with a dangling Coca-Cola logo stretches across the stone stage of the Ancient theatre of Epidaurus. It dominates the skyline, eclipsing the Peloponnese hills behind. A monumental theatre, with seats for almost 10,000 people, this is where the ancients gathered from the 4th century BC onwards and where the crowd is almost full to capacity on this summer night. While other parts of the nation broil in alarming heat, here there is an airy mountain breeze and pin-drop silence as a production of Medea, by the German director Frank Castorf, plays out.
It is not what the traditional crowd is accustomed to: combining Euripides’s text with excerpts from Heiner Müller and Arthur Rimbaud, it features not one murderous mother in Medea, who kills her children as revenge against her unfaithful husband, Jason, but five actors (Stefania Goulioti, Sofia Kokkali, Maria Nafpliotou, Angeliki Papoulia, Evdokia Roumelioti) who appear simultaneously on stage as different versions of her.
There is more avant gardism, from Castorf’s characteristic handheld cameras to Aleksandar Denić’s set, featuring a rubbish tip and tents that hint at a consumerist, late-capitalist wasteland but also a refugee camp. It is a nod to Medea’s outsider status – a woman from Colchis marooned in Corinth, a land that no longer wants her – and modern-day Greek refugee camps such as Lesbos.
Medea, in all her incarnations, appears to be a sex worker, flamboyantly decked out in ostrich feathers, gold-fringed dresses and smeared makeup. Jason and Creon are gun-toting apogees of toxic masculinity. A three-hour play presented through the male gaze – the cameras capture the women’s bodies intimately – these five female actors create a magnificently wronged Medea, apoplectically in pain.
The premiere is part of the Athens Epidaurus festival, an annual celebration of the ancient Greek dramatists founded in 1955. It has hosted the likes of Maria Callas, Rudolf Nureyev and some of the world’s biggest orchestras, and is seen as a bastion of Greek culture. But the programme this year has a sense of a festival firmly in the throes of revamping itself – and Castorf’s Medea is just one example.
Katerina Evangelatos, who became its artistic director in 2019, has sought to hasten its transformation by programming fresh, sometimes radical, retellings for the main stage in Epidaurus and introducing a new strand, Grape, in Athens, which showcases contemporary Greek theatre, including a drag act and a production of The Bacchae that weaves myth with gender fluidity.
While there is still the expectation to see faithful productions in this most hallowed of venues, audiences have become slightly more open to more experiment, says Evangelatos. “Ten years ago, the audience would have booed in the first 15 minutes of Castorf’s Medea.” This change was already happening before she took over, she adds, but she would like to speed it along before her tenure ends in 2025.
To that end, she has also conceived the Contemporary Ancients cycle, in which young artists are commissioned to write plays inspired by the classics. They are then translated into English, published and staged. One such work was Maja Zade’s 2021 Ödipus, inspired by Oedipus and featuring four characters in a kitchen, which was played in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus. “Some people were shocked,” says Evangelatos.
As part of this cycle, she commissioned Pantelis Flatsousis’s Thebes: A Global Civil War this year for the 1,000-seater Little theatre of Ancient Epidaurus. Inspired by Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, in which one brother embarks on a military campaign against another, the production is verbatim “docu-fiction” with four actors (Vedrana Božinović, Racha Baroud, Albertine Itela and George Kritharas) narrating real-life testimonies that speak of civil war in Bosnia, Greece, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Lebanon. The play explores the impact of war on characters and its globalised ripples with actors’ faces magnified on a back-screen.
Evangelatos’s own modern dress version of Euripides’s Hippolytus, staged at the Ancient theatre of Epidaurus, is another example of a radical approach to the classics. Adapted by Evangelatos, its story sees Aphrodite seeking revenge against Hippolytus for taking an oath of chastity and here the goddess is on stage for the entire duration with a camera in hand, making her own film of the drama. It also contains an entirely naked chorus, which, Evangelatos says, has never before been seen at Epidaurus, while Phaedra’s sexual fantasy of Hippolytus is enacted as an orgy on stage.
She was braced for an outcry from the audience but of the 17,000 people who saw the performance over two days in Epidaurus, the response was overwhelmingly positive. “I was surprised. I thought people would shout or throw bottles on stage. I had told the actors I would protect them. But nobody shouted and there was warm applause at the end.”
The third generation in a prominent Greek family of artists, Evangelatos’s illustrious background, soaked as it is in the classics, arguably affords her some leeway. Her grandfather was a composer, conductor and one of the pillars of new Greek music. Her late father, Spyros Evangelatos, was a director of theatre and opera, and her mother, the celebrated actor Leda Tassopoulou, played more than 30 leading parts in ancient Greek drama before her death at the age of 51.
“I have known this festival for a lifetime. My mother first brought me here when I was 30 days old. Every summer my parents had a play in Epidaurus for 30 years. For me it has great symbolism – I love this tradition and I don’t want to pee on it, but it’s my personal mission to take it into a new contemporary phase. If we want this tradition to survive and not become a museum, we have to do this.”
Evangelatos wants to push the boundaries between the material staged at the main Epidaurus theatre and its smaller counterpart, which has hitherto been ringfenced for more radical retellings. “I want to create a conversation [between the two] but not eliminate the differences.”
Evangelatos’s drives towards the contemporary could be seen as part of a larger cultural push to escape the enormous “heritage” shadow of the Acropolis, and bring Greek culture fully into the 21st century. The Athens Biennale, launching in 2007, aimed to put the city on the contemporary art map, while the appointment of Nicholas Yatromanolakis in 2019 as secretary for contemporary culture bears its own symbolism.
Still, the shift in theatre is not without resistance. Savas Patsalidis, a theatre professor at Aristotle University, speaks of the phenomenon of “collective ownership”. There is a sense among some, she says, that he is “our Aeschylus” and any change to his text is seen as sacrilege and violation.
Those who come to Epidaurus do not shy away from expressing disapproval: there has been loud booing with people conspicuously marching out. This year was no exception, and a free adaptation of Aristophanes’ satire The Wasps, which presented a people’s courts as TV show and included social media, was met by protest with audience walkouts and one reviewer speaking of it as a breach of the “dignity of the entire Greek theatre”.
There are those who feel these ancient plays represent Greek identity and to tamper with them is to undermine that identity. But for Flatsousis, this is a misunderstanding: the tragedies are not for Greece’s perception of itself. “For me as a Greek director this legacy is not a burden. It may sound weird but I think Greek tragedy is not our heritage. It speaks about big things and it speaks for all of humanity. I try to avoid this idea of ‘my’ heritage. My heritage as a human could also be Shakespeare or Brecht.”
Flatsousis points out that even the ancients were “re-telling” stories rather than inventing them – so Euripides reworked the plays of Sophocles, who was in turn re-telling those of Aeschylus, while all three were re-shaping Homer’s oral stories.
Mario Banushi, a Greek playwright of Albanian heritage, is a rising star who represents the new face of Greek theatre. His play, Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, as part of the Grape strand of the festival, explores loss, family and immigrant identity, drawing on personal experience of watching his sisters and stepmother grieve his father’s death. A wordless production, the narrative is driven by the haunting vocals of Savina Yannatou, one of Greece’s pre-eminent singers, who begins with an Albanian lullaby and improvises evocative laments as a character on stage. A singer with a keen interest in medieval and renaissance music of Greece, Yannatou says: “I always mix the old and the new. It depends on how you do it … but I believe you have to do it.”
“I am looking at Greek identity in a Balkan way,” adds Banushi, who is drawn to the idea of remaking a Greek tragedy in a contemporary mould – and bringing the immigrant experience to it as well as ancient ritual from the Balkans. “I see resistance to change in Greek audiences but to understand these tragedies you have to speak of [themes such as] death and family loss as we see and feel them today.”
Athens Epidaurus festival runs until 26 August. Arifa Akbar’s trip was provided by the festival
