The stage is littered with carnations, whiskey bottles and plenty of dalks. The atmosphere is powdery and smoky, indicating that before these last minutes, many, many, maybe whole lives have left the tables.

Movement on and around the stage becomes more disjointed and chaotic, brooms picking up carnations and putting them in big bags. The wells open until everyone at some point goes their own way.

He sits in his tiny “military” dressing room, as he puts it, in a shiny jacket, black tank top, chain, and slicked back hair. The light of the mirror forms a frame around him, and you can swear that he did not return from the stage, but is about to hit the dance floor with a microphone. Zippo flashes.

He Stathis Stamulakatos and more recently, he was one of the “regulars” of the doghouse, around which his events take place “Summer”, show written Anthony Tsiotsiopulos (you saw him last year in “Magnetic Fields”), directed by George Palumpis in Jenny Karesis Theatre.

This is actually Sophocles, the protagonist of the play. “You didn’t get the good part,” he tells me, wanting to let me know that the play is hiding some kind of “surprise” and especially his role, which is much larger than what the dressing room scene foreshadows.

He has the speed of a “sidewalk” – after all, he has been a courier for almost three decades, he knows what a street is. But he also has an understated kindness, free from “you and me,” that sweetens the image we have of him through his roles. Zippo is reopening.

I don’t know, probably a coincidence. Antonis wrote the play some time ago to take place elsewhere, but he liked it better in a dog kennel. “Spring” is unfolding now, but the event that gives meaning to the work took place 30 years ago. And the world of the 90s was a different world. Things were more authentic. It was a textile store in Elefsina that burned down after a fire and they turned it into a dog kennel overnight with insurance money. The protagonist, Sophocles, leaves on the night his father dies, and his brother confesses a secret to him. He also receives some money, disappears for five years and returns to his mother’s funeral, but in a slightly different way. Of course, not only its diversity helps to clarify this mystery.

– Variety all around. Okay, and secrets that, if not told at the right time, eat people. Heroes keep secrets for many years. And then comes Sunday afternoon, and during the day everything falls apart. The conflict has to happen.

“In simple bouzouki and this type of bouzouki, a bit decadent, people were more authentic. And drinking helps, you get free, you get out of trouble, you find yourself in another world all of a sudden. Until dawn, when you return to the world of reality and see your shitty life. There you feel like a king, that everything is possible for you and everything is allowed. That’s why I believe Antonis used a dog house.

– Because maybe the audience is a lumpen too. And he probably doesn’t know it. When you think that I am superior to some others, you fall into a trap. The show recognizes that authenticity that you cannot experience in life as someone. We also have an era of political correctness, you can’t say, you can’t do. And maybe that’s what the world sees, the real man. Yes, you can call him obscene, call him impudent, but you see that if he shows it, then this person does not hide anything from you, he is who he is.

Everything that is not as it should be. Folk is real. When I am spontaneous, I am from the bottom of my heart, I tell you that I love you, and I tell you that I love you, it has nothing else.

How can we not live? We have a cold season.

“We did a whole analysis of who Sophocles was, what it took him to say, ‘I still don’t want more’. He was also a popular man, a dude, a leader here. And the path began, there was a one-sided love, not necessarily going anywhere.

– To be able to understand Sophocles, to enter a world with which I had no connection. I know one side of him but not the other, that was the hardest part.

– No, I created my character together with Antonis and all the kids here. Sophocles is a real person, they just call him differently. I began to understand this little by little, I tried to lay a route. If you don’t build this required path, you’ll just create a form.

“Since the show’s key theme is diversity, who is it ultimately aimed at, someone who already embraces it or wants to tickle others?” I ask, just as Antonis Tsiotsiopulos enters the locker room. “You answer,” Stamulakatos tells him. “Mostly it is addressed to others. Those who hugged her hugged her. And those who embrace diversity see the non-professional world differently. In essence, this is an invitation to us, who understand diversity, to understand this world, and to those who understand it, to understand diversity.” He salutes and exits the locker room.

– Yes, there may be bad weather, but basically it is the bad weather in which we live.

How can we not live? We have a cold season.

– He. I was born in 72. In 1987, when we won the European Basketball Championship, I was 15 and went to Athens. And it was clear that people became more authentic, cleaner, there were no cell phones, social networks, all this nonsense.

– That we do not accept each other in the first place and are very individual, we take care of ourselves. Relationships no longer exist the way they used to. People don’t talk, they only talk through pictures. Okay, now Instagram photos are not our life. Photograph what? Your face? That’s a lot of narcissism.

– Not. Because personally I chose to be with people who are also people. I heard from some children that we were with such and such a director, and he did this to us. And I say, guys, how do you stand it? And they tell me not to work? Don’t work man, I worked 28 years on a motorcycle, go work somewhere else.

“I’m sorry, but there are no authorities. Some people are just fascinated by some idiots. May I suggest that you draw a cockroach climbing a curtain and try to do it?

– From Yannis Economides. Because he really talks to you, tells you what he wants. No bullshit, it’s so pure and authentic. And it emerges through discussion, work. Economides never told me to jump like a kangaroo. Am I lucky? Yes. When I saw that it was no good, I gave it up. From time to time, people I knew they smoked would come up to me and say, “Wow, you’re amazing,” but I knew what it was. Because you can hear it all, whether or not they want to say it. We all know.

– Never. If I don’t want to, I don’t. Another thing is when they say that this is a “bad guy” and he is such and such, they say, here’s the bread. I can’t stand those who tell you that he is a “bad guy”. It’s there, there is standardization.

Theater is a very lively thing. It’s like a loaf of bread, you make it, bake it at that moment and eat it. It doesn’t stop, it’s swimming. You know that there are living people next to you, you catch energies. It can be different from show to show. On camera, when something is filmed, it stays that way for a thousand years. Do you mean; Are you a masterpiece? You will be like this for a thousand years. It’s just a stalemate in the theatre. If you arrived in March 2022, saw the broadcast and spoke about it five years later, only if you find another person who came on the same day as you can discuss it and you will still have disagreements. The theater exists only in the thought of the one who reproduces it in the mind.

“These are other worlds. A motorcycle is a lifetime. It was terribly exhausting, physically and then mentally. And in the theater there is mental fatigue. But doing what I dreamed about makes me happy.

No, because I’m still inside. If at some point I give up and leave, yes, I can sit somewhere on the balcony, make coffee and say it. But then I’ll be gone, I’ll be somewhere else.

– I didn’t think about it. This thing could kill me. I could kill myself.

Stathis Stamulakatos will play Sophocles in “Kolokairo” written by Antonis Tsiotsiopulos and directed by Giorgos Palumbis, every Monday and Tuesday at 21:00 at the Tseni Karezi Theatre.